January is the beginning of a new tax year for me and not a time I start a new diet. You see, I don’t have New Year’s Resolutions. This is because I never really lose my goals or my need for them…the to-do program is perpetual, my tasks on-going. Work-in-progress activities making me a stronger, healthier, better person. You know, change up the menus, exercise more regularly, get up in the morning, remember birthdays, clean the fridge every once in a while. I don’t strive for Perfection, just a steady moving forward, towards it. I start brand new every Monday morning. Ask my family about my lists: grocery, cleaning, doctor and vet appointments, home improvement projects, vacation schedules. And as long as I’m not sick or too tired, I manage to accomplish quite a bit over the course of four seasons. By the end of December, however I’m completely exhausted. Resolutions I don’t need. What I need is restitution.

After we’ve whooshed through the holidays and look backward at the highs and lows of the year, what remains is a weary reminder that life is complicated and hard and often unfair. How can we not? There’s the Doomsday predictions, the lists of tragedy’s highlights, who died, who did what to whom. Even the most dedicated optimist can’t escape this, given the pundits who catalogue our worst moments, our embarrassments, our failings. Hello? Do we really need to go there? Does the end of December have to include a flashback to the bad? Come on, we know a few things sucked in 2009. We were there. Can’t we spend perhaps more time on what we did right? You’ll have to excuse me, but this all seems just a tad medieval and self defeating. No wonder we get so depressed just about now.

Is it necessary for us to have our noses rubbed into, well you know? I personally do a lot better with positive reinforcement: a hug, a big sale, a good hair day, a compliment- these keep me going. Give a puppy a treat instead of a wallop with the rolled up newspaper, right? Ask Cesar Milan. Ask Mr. Rogers. Ask Julia Childs. (Well okay, food might not respond to any kind of reinforcement.) What I’m saying is that we might all do better focusing on what makes us our best instead of what makes us our worst. Art critiques never made me a better artist. Just angrier. What is this insane regiment of judgment we do unto ourselves and unto others? Is it so crazy to give ourselves encouragement? I mean, who straps their child up on the bike without the training wheels for the first time, pushing him or her down the hill at top speed and screaming as that child is let go, “Don’t fall and bleed like you did last time, you twit!”

The definition of restitution is “compensation for loss, damage or injury, the restoration of something, as property to the rightful owner.” A long year depletes many things. As any creative knows, whether he or she is a writer, visual artist, performer or musician, making art will always bring you heartache. To get back up and to start all over, in spite of what might happen, requires our best selves, replenished and rested. It requires we start out equipped and prepared, with a solid foundation, energized once again so that we don’t quit.

Therefore, instead of declaring my resolutions of what I would do better, instead I ask for restitution of what’s slipped away. I need replenishment to embrace 2010 with an abundance of creative will and energy and determination.

Here are my Top Ten requests:

1. Faith that there is enough time.
2. Wonderment in all that is possible.
3. Integrity in all that I do.
4. Patience in my ability to learn.
5. Determination to stay the course
6. Belief in my talent and my place in the world
7. Kindness because it should be shared.
8. Joy in the act of creating.
9. Strength in my convictions.
10. Awareness that I have a purpose.

With a renewal of all of this, and perhaps those new brushes I desperately need, I’m good to go. Bring it on. Happy New Year!

Copyright 2009 Ann Haaland