A mllion brilliant little ones

If and when I ever grow up, I want to be like my friend Jayne.

This is something I've been promising myself for a long time, and really do think I'm making progress, but still, she continues to surprise me by seeming to raise the bar when all she's really doing is being consistently Jayne, which when all is said and done, is all she ever needs to be.

What's brought this post on is that today I checked the mail.

Back in October Jayne had paid me a weekend visit.  I took her around to all of the local places I haunt including Bookwise, one of my favorite places on earth and to most, that's a well-kept secret.  And what do you suppose was in a birthday card I got from her today but a gift certificate I didn't even know was offered.

Looking at the gift, I remembered the time I'd stayed with Jayne for a while.  She'd just moved into a new apartment and when it came time to create her alarm code, she thought to use my birthdate so that I'd be able to remember how to disarm it.

That's Jayne's secret.  Anticipation, planning, thoughtfulness, and follow-through.  She's full of the little bright ideas like these and they all roll up into the kind of person who's easy to be around, who leaves a trail of goodwill in the wake of her personal and professional successes .  As, on December 20,  I still struggle with coming up with a Big Idea for my husband's Christmas gift this year, Jayne doesn't wait for the single big idea to come to her.  She's got a million brilliant little ones.

Note to myself:  Stop waiting for the Big One.

Two-Oh-One-Oh

Good Lord, it's December already and it looks as though this blog thing has been.. shall we say, sporadic?

Giving good thought to what this blog is supposed to be all about - Ideas (forget Big Ideas because those are hard to come up with, consume way too much time, and require the kind of fortitude and undivided attention I'd rather divide.), I've decided that this shall be about Littler Ideas. Manageable Ideas. Nonthreatening Ideas. Brilliant Ideas. After all, this, I claim, is the space in which they can be nurtured and grown. Besides, it's all most of us with bright dreams and full time jobs have the time or energy for.

With that being typed, I can tell you that I've also been giving lots of thought to ways in which I can bring lots of terrific Little Ideas to my personal life in order to grow a bigger and better 2010.

Whew. 2010. I think that may be the first time I've written that. (By the way, how will you pronounce that? Are you a modernist going with Twenty-ten or traditionalist sticking with Two thousand ten?)

Back to growing Little Ideas. See, I'm feeling the whole hope of a new year thing and have been inspired by various Happiness websites like, well... The Happiness Project for instance. But I'm not going to follow the project online because that probably involves more commitment than I've time for. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make one tiny resolution per day in 2010, and they're going to be the kind I can complete in a single day and therefore easily keep. They're also not going to be the kind that'll set me up with a dreaded daily task in order to fulfill empty self-improvement goals. They're just going to be the kind that'll force me outside myself and get me to to live mindfully and purposefully, if even for one resolution.

The tiny, manageable, less than earth-moving resolutions are going to look like this:

Day 1: Make (from scratch) a thank you card.

Day 2: Spend time with my spouse watching one entire televised sporting event from beginning to end.

Day 3: Do 1 nice thing for someone I really can't stand.

Etc.

The challenge is to come up with 365 new little things to do in 2010. And, then, of course, write a weekly wrapup of them Right Here. See? There's the goal right there, the place where this Little Idea rolls right up into its bigger one, to regularly write throughout the coming year.

Easy, right? That's it. That's the 2010 Biggest Little Idea I could come up with.