New Year's Resolution

The confetti has settled, the noisemakers have quieted, the champagne has gone flat.  It is New Year's Day 2014.  This is the Chinese Year of the Horse.  All over social media are sentiments of "Goodbye, 2013!" and "Hello, 2014!" as well as a range of emotions concerning the traditional New Year's Resolution.  Some say that it is a lie you tell yourself on January 1st, that will by January 10th prove itself to be nothing more than a public "I-woulda-shoulda-coulda."  Some say that it is a goal that takes all year long to achieve.

To me, New Year's Resolutions have historically been a mix.  Sometimes I chose a resolution destined to forever remain a pipe dream; other years, I neglected to create a concrete goal for the year at all, condemning myself as a person who just won't realistically put in the work after all.  A few years, I met with success almost instantly (met my goal far ahead of schedule, and then sat around for the rest of the year inquiring, "Now what?").  Other years, I plugged hard and away all year long, meeting the goal of "working harder" but losing sight of what I was working so hard for.

This year's goal is much more simple: Make more goals, and achieve them.

My first goal has a time limit of thirty-one days: January 1 - January 31, to be exact.  My goal is to spend at least one hour every day doing something related to horses, although preferably being in contact with horses.  To people with horses, this might seem pretty silly.  There are plenty of horse owners who can use up an hour of every day just feeding their horse once in the morning and once in the evening.  The thing to understand is that I am not presently committed to the care of my own horse, but that I am committed to a great many other things.  For example, Mondays for me usually require me to leave for work at seven o'clock in the morning, and not come home again from working two jobs until eight-thirty or so at night.  After that, it is incredibly easy to plop down on the couch and not think about doing anything else the rest of the day.  Now I am challenging myself to do more.  Simple as that.

Day One of my January Challenge has found me studying hard for three hours from my Equine Science textbook.  I'm coming into 2014 with some residual illness from 2013 (I've been in a three-week cycle of getting and recovering from the flu), so I'm not able to go to the barn to learn anything hands-on.  Besides reading today, I'm going to lay back in bed for a while and watch some more of the 2014 George H Morris Horsemastership Training Session while I rest.

Don't forget to keep tabs on my progress on the Sonata Equestrian Facebook Page!