Happy New Year! It has been too embarrassing a lapse since my last post. But as our teenage daughter has been prone to saying (ironically, of course) this past week: “New Year, new me!”

I am gliding into this still relatively new year rather gingerly. By the time the big ball was dropping on Times Square to ring in the Year of the Boar, I was already in bed, being a bore (sorry, could not resist). This, by the way, is tantamount to sacrilege as a native of Japan, where New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year, with rituals, traditions and symbolisms galore. Some time before the stroke of midnight, for example, one eats toshikoshi soba (year-crossing buckwheat noodles), the length of the noodles symbolizing a bridge between the old and the new, long-lasting relationships and longevity. Instead, I was deep into REM sleep. I was exhausted from 2018.

Last year was packed with milestones, starting with the death of my father-in-law and ending in our daughter turning 16, the legal driving age. In-between there were several house and school changes, professional highs and lows, my first electric car, my first vote as an American citizen, lots of travel (Japan, Portugal, Panama, Vietnam, Norway, France, Belize) and non-zen moments aplenty (where adolescence, middle age and jet lag collided). The holiday season totally caught me off guard. I  stopped to look up from my iPhone (the shame!) – and the holidays were suddenly and furiously upon us. Instead of enjoying Advent, savoring the chorale music I love, slowly building up our Christmas cookie portfolio, I was “cramming” preparations, getting cranky, almost missing the point of it all. I did not like myself like that. 

As with every New Year, I resolve to make some changes, a software update to a better version of myself. Unlike my hitherto go-go self, though, I want those changes this year to be smaller and more gentle. I am learning that little, sometimes instant tweaks can make a huge difference in my overall well-being: leaving the house five minutes earlier than I think I need to; removing the Facebook app from my iPhone; turning off the cute but insidious whistle sound notifications for incoming texts; not reading my emails first thing in the morning and last thing at night; etc. I am already feeling much lighter, much less tethered. Thanks to Daniel Pink and Gretchen Rubin, I have learned not to rely so much on my own will power than on strategies that work, based on data-based research and on my own personal tendencies.

I’ve adopted a motto for 2019 : “Slow down and be early.”  And as I write this post, I realize that my mascot is the tortoise in the Aesop fable:

A Hare was making fun of the Tortoise one day for being so slow.

“Do you ever get anywhere?” he asked with a mocking laugh.

“Yes,” replied the Tortoise, “and I get there sooner than you think.”