Thoughts — Jennifer Terry

I know life doesn’t always go as planned but a few days into the new year the universe decided to throw my family a curve ball and our lives will never be the same again. My brother, Paul passed away in his sleep.

Our family had just barely began to mend our ties with Paul in June 2023 after a long absence. Slowly, we were getting to know each other and my father who had always wanted our family to be together again was beaming. They had just started to pick up where they had left off and were in the process of getting to know each other again. It was magical to watch as they got to share their passions with one another and have discussions about everything they had been wanting to talk about for so long.

My brother would often tell me; “Our Dad is So Cool.” and how much he love him. He ended every call or conversation with me by saying, “Love you Sis!”. At first it caught me off guard but I thoroughly enjoyed the time we got to spend together and my only wish is that I had more of it.

Life has many challenges and death of loved ones are some of the hardest. Grief is a messy emotion and loss leaves a hole in your life that you can never get back. While I will forever miss Paul and the moments that we had gotten to be brother and sister again, I will always cherish the moments that we did have together and strive to have cherished moments with the rest of my family and. the people who I love.

A couple of days ago the world rang in a new year and with that annual tradition comes the historical convention of making resolutions that are either undoable or are doable, but more likely to be done tomorrow (or a month from now). I am, like many others, trying to accomplish these lofty goals that are yearly made and shortly forgotten with one major difference. This year, I’m going to accomplish everything I want to accomplish.

Every year I make goals for myself. Sometimes I write them down and other times I keep them them in my head to save myself from the embarrassment of not accomplishing any of them. This year, I’m trying something different. I’m going to hold myself accountable for my actions by putting my intentions out into the world, even if it is in the small way of writing it down in my blog that most likely will not be seen by many.

First things first

It has recently come to my attention that I do not finish things. I am a person with a lot of fun and creative ideas for projects and yet I rarely follow through with completing any of them. Over time, this fact has really given my self esteem a hit and so this year I am going to give all of my past ideas another looky loo and determine which ones I feel would be worth tryin to complete, kind of like trying to salvage gems out of a junk drawer.

My Goal

At the end of the year, I hope to be able to say that I’ve completed and put out into the world at least five projects outstanding in my ledger of ideas of Jenny past. Now, what does “put out into the world” mean in this context? I’m not too sure yet but I think that what will probably happen is that I will either put on line for free or for sale dependent on what type of project I’m trying to complete. Some ideas that I have involve real world interaction which, in more recent years have been harder for me but I will tackle those projects as they come forth.

In Short

I am going to to tackle these hard goals for myself and though this post is kind of vague, I hope to update this blog once a week and shed more light on what I would like to accomplish for this year of 2024.