Before Forty

Why that is New Year’s Resolutions never grab for the low hanging fruit? I’m thinking we miss the opportunity to set easily achieved goals. 

We could resolve to watch more television in the New Year, for example, or eat more junk food, or to be cranky and irritable come tax season. Instead we resolve to do difficult things like lose weight or save more. 

I’m in the 'difficult resolution' camp this year I suppose. At the stroke of midnight I resolved to participate in one of the marathon races in the redwood forests of California . So, in one fell swoop, I've managed to resolve to exercise and save more.

Actually this resolution crosses off two line items from my sometime-before-turning-forty life list. And it's a good idea to double-up on that list. I have just a smidge over one year left. 

The marathon (or the half) is a goal that either explains itself or else  falls under the wildly ambitious category and can't be demystified. 

Visiting the redwoods, though, draws from my long standing romantic obsession with trees. I think everybody has a landscape they’re drawn toward. A particular skyline that conjures some sense of feeling centered or well. Some people are pulled toward city-scapes, others have an affinity for white sandy beaches. There is the sort of person that can’t stray too far from the mountains, but I’m a misty morning in the forest sort of a person. 

Last year N & I enjoyed reading Wild Trees by Richard Preston at bedtime. After a particularly lovely section of text where Preston describes the redwood tree canopy N nuzzled into her pillow and said: 

"You want to go there sometime, don't you?" 

"I do. Very much." 

"I can hear that," she said, "in the way your voice sounds soft with all the words."