It’s another New Year, and so it feels like a fresh start. It feels like a brand new clean sheet of paper waiting to be written on. At least that’s what I wish it felt like. The reality is slightly different.

The reality is that my house stinks like pork ramen that my teenager apparently made in the middle of the night, and there’s the remains of a partly finished bottle of champagne on the counter along with two dirty flutes and some cracker crumbs and leftover crunch-n-munch in a bowl, and there are clothes in the dryer waiting to be folded and put away, and there’s over a week’s worth of mail to be read and sorted, and bills to be paid, and suitcases to be unpacked, and yes, still boxes from the move back in July to be dealt with. Oh. My. Gawd.

Throw in the fact that the heat isn’t working properly and that we currently have no power to the master bathroom, and all of a sudden the New Year is feeling sort of overwhelming. In fact, I don’t think I have six square feet of space anywhere in this house where I feel like everything is as it should be, even if I disregard the cold factor.

I wanted to start 2015 with a bang. I wanted to refocus and reenergize. I wanted to make it the BEST. YEAR. EVER. But here it is, not even 9 am and I realizing that maybe that goal is just a little too lofty. I need to readjust. So here’s what I’m going for instead. I’m going to do the best I can. And some days maybe even not that. I’m going to focus on the small victories, like the fact that just this morning I managed to get all my music into my new phone. Man the learning curve on that thing is steep!

I’m going to celebrate each time the dishwasher gets emptied. I’m going to feel satisfaction every time laundry is completed. I’m going to congratulate myself each time I lace up my sneakers and go for a walk. I’m going to rejoice in the love of my family. I’m going to focus on living in the moment while still keeping an eye to the future. It’s coming up quickly. We’re already halfway through my son’s junior year of high school, and once he finishes there will be huge changes for all of us. This is both exciting and terrifying, but I know we’ll get through it.

In the meantime I will keep writing, I will keep reading, I will keep teaching, I will keep living and loving and learning and trying to see the world through a positive lens. I will keep moving ahead, one step at a time. For my first step, I will clean up the kitchen. It may not be much, but it’s a start.