New Year, New World, New You?

Readers from "before times," when this was an actual health and fitness blog, may recall that I've already written many posts about New Year's Resolutions.

There's a search bar if you're curious, and if you were to type in New Years Resolutions, many, many posts would come up, full of advice and complaints. Mostly it's the obvious stuff: Keep promises realistic, and expectations low. Aim for baby steps. Celebrate small victories. Try hard, but expect repeated failures, and focus more on getting back on track and not giving up than on perfection.

We know this stuff. And yet the failure rate for resolutions remains pretty darn high. So the heck with that, let's not talk about making promises to ourselves that we may not keep!

Instead, let's talk about hopes and dreams and intentions for the coming year in a totally hypothetical way. No pressure. After all, the beginning of a new year is a good time for reflection, for fresh starts, and maybe even big dreams. And if thinking big leads you to want to do something little in order to get there... bonus!

But before we get to that... a special request.

So I recently found out that the little doohickey at the top of the sidebar that was supposed to encourage email sign-ups? It didn't actually work.

But now there is a much better, user-friendly email subscription/newsletter link. Please sign up! Your email will stay totally private, and you can always unsubscribe later if you get tired of my ramblings.

That way when a new post is out, you will not have to swing by the sad little Facebook page to find out about it. You can read new posts in your email. Or, having been duly alerted, come back here to read it and leave a comment and make my cranky old heart sing.

One thing you WON'T have to worry about is getting a whole slew of Just Cranky blog posts. One or two a month is probably max, and you know me... I will likely stop posting again, and then in 2035 you will suddenly discover that I've yet again resurrected the blog, which will appear as a hologram in the artificially intelligent lenses surgically implanted into your eyeballs.

There may at some point be an announcement about my novel, Niccolo Would Like a Word, hitting virtual bookshelves in a few weeks or maybe months. But I won't be a pest about it.

How To Accept Chronic Illness or Disability Gracefully?

Maybe it happens all of a sudden: you're crossing the street in a clearly marked crosswalk and a car runs a red light and hits you. And your body is never the same again.

Or maybe it's the onset of a peculiar minor symptom, followed by more strange little symptoms, all of which get more alarming and eventually turn out to have a common, unfixable cause.

Possibly it's just the inevitable, but still disagreeable, result of getting older. Organs and other body parts begin to fail in ways that are not reversible.

But the bottom line is: you are no longer "healthy" in the way you used to be, and you probably never will be again, and the best you can do is try to accept this and move forward.

But how?

Oh wait... maybe you thought I was proposing an answer? No, I was asking YOU, because I seem to really suck at this whole acceptance thing.