You've Come A Long Way, Baby . . .

One of my favorite hobbies when I was a kid was to cut pictures out of magazines and make them into collages. My mom always had a lot of magazines around and I would spend hours cutting and pasting. My favorite cut outs were from cigarette ads. They used full size figures so they made great paper dolls as well as interesting collage subjects. I did a Google search to see if I could find an example and I was taken back to 1970-something when I saw some of the exact same characters that I cut out when I was 9-ish:

Maybe that's why the idea of a Vision Board was so appealing. I've also spent a lot of time lately pondering my life in the past, present and future. I'm definitely going through a phase of evaluating who I am and what I've accomplished and how quickly time passes and how very little time I have left in the great scheme of things which I'm sure is all part of the aging process so the idea of looking into the future in an intentional way on New Year's Day made perfect sense.

Instead of making a bunch of resolutions that I would fail to keep, I found myself thinking about what the coming year might hold. And how I can prepare myself to deal with it! Things like: Zach graduating from high school and entering college, Gloria becoming a teenager, a business that continues to get busier and more physically demanding, and, maybe the most difficult of all, turning 45.

Maybe it's just me but I think we all must reach a point when we decide how we're going to age. It started to hit me when I was about 42. I looked around and I saw people who were over 50 and some of them still seemed to really enjoy life. Others just seemed old. I decided I wanted to be in the former category. . .

It's easier said than done and there are always circumstances beyond our control but I want to choose to live in the present and not focus on what could have been or should have been or what MIGHT happen. . .

I want to remember 2011 instead of letting it become a blurry memory. The other day I wrote in the notepad on my Blackberry (my favorite place to keep deep thoughts!), "Someday has arrived". This is it. This. Is. Someday.

So. . . I spent the entire day on Saturday looking through magazines and waiting for words and pictures to strike a chord. And this is what I came up with:

I'm expecting this to be a good year. . .