Here's to the Endless Possibilties.

When you work in the industry I do, the first week of January is always designated for one thing, work-wise.  The national sales meeting.

I imagine most sales meetings in most consumer product markets unfold in generally the same way.  There are a lot of sessions, a lot of meetings, several important speakers.  There are dinners to attend and reps to meet and presentations to give and more reps to meet and hospitality suites to frequent and late nights and early mornings and when it is all over, at the end of the week, every single attendee is exhausted.  If it's gone well, they are both exhilarated and exhausted.  If it's gone really well (or, I suppose, really poorly) they are likely exhausted, exhilarated, and nursing one hell of a hangover from the final night's celebrations.

Our meeting was out in my beloved San Francisco this year, which was, of course, wonderful and a delightful break from the frigid winter weather we're experiencing in Boston.  However, the thing about a busy sales meeting, especially one in which you're running sessions and making presentations and scheduling meetings yourself is that you don't exactly get a chance to play tourist, to sightsee, or even to wander beyond the hotel block.  In fact, you don't really ever get a chance to leave the hotel.  The good news is that I know my way around the Hilton in Union Square like nobody's business.

While it makes perfect sense to hold the national sales meeting when we do and I do usually fly back East energized and yes, extremely exhausted, it makes for a weird way to start the new year.  Given the way the holidays fell this year, I felt like the whole world got to use the week of January 5th as their first step back into reality after the long holiday celebrations and festivities.  It was the week people eased back in work, school, and regular routines.  Resolutions were started, gyms were likely packed, people were probably starting their diets.  I, on the other hand, on the morning of the 5th, boarded an airplane to fly across this grand country.  Subsequently, now that I'm back East and trying to get back into the normal day to day routine, I feel a bit as if someone came into both my house and my office while I was away and shook each of them like one would a snow globe.  The emails are back-logged, the to-do list is eight miles long.  When I flew back from Atlanta after visiting my Mom for Christmas I dumped all of my loot and clothes in one pile.  Then I began packing and planning for California.  Now that I've returned from San Francisco, I've got another dumped pile.  The piles.  The clutter.  There's gotta be a personal assistant I can find that would handle all of this stuff right?  Maybe they'd work for free for college credit?  A girl can dream, right?

But here we are, despite its frenetic start in a brand new, bright and shiny, lovely new year.  Earlier - way back in 2014! - I wrote that my resolution for this year was an intention.  The year of confidence.  I wanted to not doubt myself, to remain resolved, to have confidence in my abilities and reaching for goals, to take leaps when I found myself on the edge of a proverbial cliff. 

As I talked with one of my dear friends over New Year's Day brunch, we discussed the year ahead and our resolutions. After giving it a few minutes of thought, she added the idea of having faith.  She elaborated, meaning that things are all unfolding as they should, that there is a reason things happen the way they do.  I have long believed that, but it can, let's be honest, be extremely hard to keep that faith at times.  It can be challenging and frustrating - particularly if you're a planner and doer - not to see certain outcomes or be clued in to why things are unfolding as they are.  But deep down, in my heart, despite not understanding it all, I do believe that things happen as they should.

(Most of the time anyway.)

(Come on, all of us have doubts now and again, right?)

(But we're all in this together. Let's not forget that.)

This world.  Oh, this world.  It offer us so very much.  And we are the lucky ones, as we sit here writing (or reading) a blog, living in a society where we can do and see and change and grow and explore and really never want for any of those immediate, necessary for survival types of needs.

2015.
This year holds much for all of us.  I can feel it.  Even at just two weeks in, I like it here.  I hope you do too.

"And now let us welcome the new year - full of things that have never been."

- Rainer Maria Rilke -