The Letter of Intention

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned-- it has been 8 days since my last post.


Season's greetings, my blog-babies! Now that Thanksgiving is over, I have allowed myself to jump on the Christmas bandwagon and get my festive freak on. The tree is up (my first artificial one ever) much to my kitten's delight (I've already caught her sleeping in it... yes, sleeping IN the tree), the balsam wreath is hung and wafting its sweet evergreen tang throughout the apartment, and I've nearly completed my holiday shopping. It's pretty easy when you don't have a significant other to buy for... <wistful sigh>. The Lady Apartment is looking like a fancy Christmas editorial from Real Simple Magazine or some other such inspirational publication.


Amid all this holiday preparation, I'm stopping to reflect on this past year and the year ahead. Yes, this week marks the anniversary of The Letter of Intention. What's that, you ask? In the words of Inigo Montoya, "lemme esplain". One year ago, on December 1st 2010, I sat down in my tiny bedroom in the back of my sister's apartment in Philadelphia (where I was living at the time), opened up a Pages document (because I have a Mac and I'm better than you), and began writing a letter. Who was the letter to? Myself. Who was the letter from? Myself... or the myself I would be a year from that night. That night I time-traveled and the 2011 me told the 2010 me about all the great things I had accomplished, all the positive changes I had made in my life, and all the lessons I had learned over the course of the year. These weren't goals-- I wasn't setting a bar in this letter... no no, all these things had already happened and I was just reflecting and bragging about them to myself. This was not a to-do list, this was a Letter of Intention. I talked about the great apartment I got, how it was decorated, what it looked like. I talked about the job I had, how much I got paid, and the kind of work I did. I talked about the artistic projects I got involved in over the course of 2011. I talked about my health, my family and my love life. And while I remember some of the details, I'm excited to open up that Pages document on Thursday (December 1st, 2011... exactly 1 year later) and read it to see how far I've come. For you see, I haven't opened it since I wrote it. I know that many things I wrote, that I projected one year ago, have been SPOT ON and have fallen into place, but I'm very interested to see just how accurate I was in my prediction about where I'd be on December 1st, 2011. We'll see...