I wonder...

I wonder what it's like to travel to a brand new place. I only ever go to Maine, or Tennessee. I want to GGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOO somewhere...lots of places actually. I suppose this will be what I do when I am retired because I did not do it in all of my young, poor years. I want to though. I dream about it. I see other places in pictures and I get so excited, and my imagination starts spinning these amazing scenarios of what it would be like to walk down that street in Paris, or to wander through that old cemetery in Scotland. I wonder...

I wonder what those people are saying in their foreign languages. I am painfully monolingual, but I don't think I would even be satisfied with bilingual. I wonder what they are ALLL saying. The Asian ladies at the nail place who keep laughing, the Spanish speaking people at the grocery store...are they fighting or do they just talk loud with all those gestures? I want to read the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that comprise our current Bible, and I want to see for myself which translation fits best. I want to know what translators for the deaf are saying. I watch them...everywhere that I find them...at church, at shows, at Epcot Candlelight Processional. It doesn't look like they are translating with word for word what the speaker is saying, and I want to know. I wonder...

I wonder when I will go home to Maine again. I haven't been home for nearly two years, and it feels like I may never go again. I wonder what my niece and nephew look like now, and act like. What my brother is playing on the guitar these days, and what puzzles my grandfather has assembled recently. Does my grandmother still have multiple quilts-in-progress in her upstairs sewing area, and is Wheel of Fortune still on at 7:00. I wonder if I can still park for free at Ferry beach if I get there before the parking guys, and if anyone would still want to play Pitch or Cribbage with me around the table on the back deck. I wonder if I would bump into my old friends at Shop and Save, and if there are other people who also will never call it Hannaford's. I wonder...

I wonder if I am doing it right. All of it...any of it? Am I making my kids eat enough vegetables, and am I love people enough, am I loveable enough myself? Do I talk on the phone with my mom regularly, and does my sister know that I miss her every day? Am I being too easy on the kids, or too tough? Am I asserting myself enough at work to make a positive change, without being so assertive that people wish the "new kid" would just pipe down? Am I making an effort to keep the people in my life that I love having in my life, and to pray for change that I want to help bring about in the world? I wonder how one person can make a difference...how I can make a difference. I wonder...

I wonder how I got this far. I wonder how much farther I will go. I wonder if I am paying it forward well enough. His love. His gift. I wonder if he looks at me and sighs like a patient, underwhelmed parent, or if he smiles and knows He did the right thing. I wonder if I will hear "well done"...I certainly hope so, but still, I wonder...

New Year's Resolutions...Not gonna do it!

I hate New Year's resolutions.

I hate them because people don't keep them. I hate them because people act like all it takes for them to be a new person is for 11:59 to become midnight. A stroke on the clock and voila, a new me!! I hate them because "everyone is doing it". Much the same way I refused to read Harry Potter or Twilight (at first) because I don't like when people ride the wave of the masses in to shore.

Resolutions, I like. I like when a person decides one dreary day in October to start exercising more, or to mail a letter to someone far away, once a week. I enjoy when a dad resolves, one hot August morning, to spend more time in the pool with the kids and less time at the office. I think life is a continuity of new resolutions. That's growth. And that's real. Because it happened when no one was expecting it, or probing them about it, or posting Facebook status updates and polls about what they should do.

But, at the start of a new year, resolutions are forbidden for me. No one is at a place of quiet reflection at the start of a new year anyway, and a place of peace and clarity is where resolutions should sprout from. We are catching our breath, loosening our belts from too much holiday food, and balancing the checkbook for the hundredth time as we marvel at how we afforded to buy all that good stuff after all. So I say, enjoy the fun, frenzy, fireworks, and spirit of hope and expectation that a new year brings. Drink some champagne, and kiss at the stroke of midnight.

The resolutions can wait until one quiet morning, maybe in March, when the perfect idea strikes.