Reflections and Resolutions

We love the start of a new year. It gives us moments to pause and think about the past year. And it brings hope for what’s to come in the year ahead. These are great moments of both reflections and resolutions. And if we take advantage of the time to ponder on where we’ve come and where we’re going, we can charge ahead excited about the unknown yet to come.

Reflections
Reflecting on the past can bring many emotions. Inevitably, every year we will have times of both joy and sadness. This year we have seen much tragedy and have experienced losses of both family and friends. But we have also experienced a lot of joyful occasions. And when we step back and look at the year as a whole, we can see that most of both our sadness and joy come from and are experienced with our family.

As a family we have been involved in many things this year – from soccer, basketball, and lacrosse to musical and theatrical performances as well as scouting, civic, and church service. Then there’s all the school activities, homework, housework, and just work. And we believe that your lives are full of much the same.

You’ll also know from our website that we’ve spent a lot of time playing family board games and card games together this year. But not only that, we’ve spent countless hours doing reviews of board games we enjoy so we can share them with others around the world. And we have loved hearing appreciation from readers and viewers worldwide about how our board game reviews have helped them find fun games for their families.

So one of our Reflections on 2010 is to recognize that we’ve enjoyed sharing our thoughts on family board games and card games and look forward to continuing that in 2011. Which brings us to the next facet of new year pondering the…

Resolutions
New Year’s Resolutions seem to strike a chord with everyone. You may love them or hate them. But either way, a new year brings with it the hope for a new start. It gives us a chance to remind ourselves about our priorities and set ourselves back on track. It’s like resetting the game and giving us a chance to try again.

There are numerous methods of how to approach your resolutions and we’ve tried a number of them. But one that we read about this year is one we’re anxious to try. Rather than make a long list of things we’d like to improve upon or categorizing the areas of our lives and choosing 1 item for each area of our lives, it is to choose a Word of the Year.

We got this idea from Kim & Jason on their Escape Adulthood blog (who in turn had seen it in another location). Although they wrote the article in December 2009, we just read it a few weeks ago. Even though we’ll summarize it here, we’d encourage you to read the article yourself (and then if you get stuck reading more on the site, you’ll find many additional gems as well).

The essence of this approach is that you select a word that you can have on your mind all year and work to make it a part of who you are. That rather than focus on “doing”, you focus on “being” or “becoming”. Which is really more about the way you approach life and the things you do will just spring naturally from it.

Whatever word you choose for 2011, we hope it helps you focus on your priorities and become who you want to become.

As for us, we haven’t selected a final word yet. But we know that whichever one each of us choose it will help us stay focused on our top priority – our family.

(And I’m sure we’ll also get lots of family board game time together in 2011 as well.)