Year in Review: 52 Quotes
12/31/2021
As I've mentioned over the years, when it comes to journaling and planners, I'm All Analog All the Time.
Here's my planner . . .
It's a Traveler's Journal. I've created my own "system" loosely based on bullet journaling, but . . . also not really bullet journaling at all. I've got 3 useful sections: monthly calendars, weekly "spreads," and a random notes section. While not fancy, it works really well for me.
Each week, I sit with the weekly spread and plan out my coming week. I transfer in any meetings and appointments and specific due dates. I plan out my dinner menus. And blog posts. I set up a little weekly "tracker" to follow my progress on the five-elements-I-need-to-stay-balanced. I create my weekly to-do list. I save a space for jotting notes and shopping lists. I plot out my workouts. And . . . for fun and inspiration . . . I find a quote to include at the top of each week's page. (Here's next week's bare-bones weekly spread -- before I start filling in the details.)
I'm quite intentional about the quotes I choose to include in my planner, although I don't get too stressed about it. The quotes usually . . . fit . . . the week in some way. Sometimes it's seasonal. Sometimes it's my mood. Sometimes it's aspirational.
Anyway. As I was going through my 2021 planner as part of my end-of-year review, it struck me that my quotes actually kind of tell the story of my year in a slightly more . . . shall we say . . . esoteric way. So I typed them up for myself.
And then I decided to share them with you.
So. Here are 52 quotes from my 2021 planner, in date order. If you squint a little, you might be able to follow my year . . . in quotes.
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jan
“Begin as you mean to go on.”
— Charles H. Spurgeon
“Most of life is showing up. You do the best you can, which varies from day to day.”
— Regina Brett
“Anyone who claims to be a leader must speak like a leader. That means speaking with integrity and truth.
— Kamala Harris
“Life is what happens while you are making other plans.”
— John Lennon
feb
“Nobody has ever measured, not even the poets, how much a heart can hold.”
— Zelda Fitzgerald
“Love is the answer, and you know that for sure. Love is a flower, you’ve got to let it grow.”
— John Lennon
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
— Emily Brontë
“Where there is love, there is life.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
mar
“In March, winter is holding back and spring is pulling forward. Something holds and something pulls inside of us, too.”
—Jean Hersey
“March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes, and a laugh in her voice.”
— Hal Borland
“By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run, and the world would wake into itself again.”
— Neil Gaiman
“Where flowers bloom so does hope.”
— Lady Bird Johnson
“My life is better every year of living it!”
— Rachel Maddow
apr
“The moon is the queen of everything. She rules the oceans, rivers, rain. When I am asked whose tears these are, I always blame the moon.”
— Lucille Clifton
“Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields [. . .]
Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
— Mary Oliver
“Here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right.”
— George Harrison, The Beatles
“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
— Mary Oliver
may
“You can’t make things grow. You have to create an environment where things want to grow.”
— Garden Marcus
“If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.”
— Barack Obama
“Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.”
— Robert Fulgham
“And into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.”
— John Muir
jun
“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flower explodes, and every sunset is different.”
—John Steinbeck
“But tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun.”
— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, The Beatles
“Live in the sunshine. Swim in the sea. Drink in the wild air.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“In summer, the song sings itself.”
— William Carlos Williams
jul
“Everything in life is a vibration.”
— Albert Einstein
“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
— David Foster Wallace
“My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”
— Virginia Woolfe
“Life is about using the whole box of crayons.”
— RuPaul
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be made with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
— Iris Murdoch
aug
“As I leave the garden, I take with me a renewed view. And a quiet soul.”
— Jessica Coupe
“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside you.”
— Deepak Chopra
“I learned a long time ago the wisest thing I can do is be on my own side, be an advocate for myself and others like me.”
— Maya Angelou
“What matters most is how you walk through the fire.”
— Charles Bukowski
sep
“Wellness is not a ‘medical fix’ but a way of living – a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit.”
— Greg Anderson
“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
“You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”
— Neil Gaiman
“Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.”
— Ray Bradbury
oct
“LIfe starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
— W.B. Yeats
“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
— William Stafford
“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonize.”
— George Eliot
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”
— Sarah Bernhardt
nov
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf’s a flower.”
— Albert Camus
“Books break the shackles of time – proof that humans can work magic.”
— Carl Sagan
“Throw open your window and let the scenery of clouds and sky enter your room.”
— Yosa Buson
“In life, one has a choice to take one of two paths: to wait for some special day – or to celebrate each special day.”
— Rasheed Ogunlani
dec
“It is December, and nobody asked if I was ready.”
— Sarah Kay
“A bare tree stands with roots on both ends in December days.”
—- Kiran Bantawa in ‘Bare Trees’
“Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.”
— Yoko On
“Happiness is a vine that takes root and grows within the heart, never outside it.”
— Kahlil Gibran
“Reflective thinking turns experience into insight.”
— John C. Maxwell
Thank you for hanging around with me this year.
Your presence, your comments, your support . . . all mean the world to me.
Happy New Year, my friends.
May 2022 be just a nice, "regular" kind of year; balanced, and with not too many surprises for any of us!
See you . . . next year!