Week 1, Task 1: Write out your life vision

Week 1: Organize Your Mind & Life Vision

Regular text is from the book "Organize Now!" by Jennifer Ford Berry. My responses are italicized, and set in the future tense, when the girls are all school-aged.

Write out your vision for your life. Answer these questions to help you find inspiration. If you could do anything...

Where would you live?

If I could live anywhere, it would probably be near a big city on one of the coasts. I want to live in a decent sized town/city where I have everything nearby and can spend as little time as possible in a car! I want to be able to walk or take a quick bus or bike ride everywhere.  I'm guessing this would probably be a college town.

How would you earn an income?

I would be a family/marriage therapist in a practice where I would mostly be my own boss.

What would your days look like?

I would get up at sunrise and do yoga every morning, followed by a morning run. Then I would come home and get ready for the day, and have breakfast with my family. After taking everyone to school I would head to work to start seeing clients. I would meet my husband for lunch on most days. I would finish up at work in time to get home and prep a family meal for after the girls have finished with any extra-curriculars. Then we would clean up after the meal, do some quick chores and spend the rest of the night finishing up homework and just spending time together.

What would you do for fun?

For fun I would participate in races and other running events on the weekends. As a family we would go on little trips to local places, like state parks to go hiking or swimming.

What would you do more of?

I would spend more time outside, more playing with my daughters, more reading and writing, more yoga and exercise.

What would you do less of?

I would spend less time watching TV, less playing on the internet, less procrastinating!

"Organize Now!"

I just bought the book "Organize Now! A week-by-week guide to simplify your space and your life!" by Jennifer Ford Berry.

I looked at a couple different books on this topic, and for some reason this one stuck out to me the most, so I decided to go ahead and get it.

From the reviews I've read you can either go straight through the book, or you can skip around to the areas that you need the most help in and it won't make a difference. I think that was one thing I liked about it, being able to make it really fit into what I need it to be. I'm going to start in order at first, but then if I come to a section that doesn't feel all that applicable to me, I'll probably start skipping around to the areas I want to work on.

The reason I'm blogging about this book is that each week has goals and questions for you to answer. I was considering buying a journal to do all of the entries in, but then I though, why not blog all of my entries? This first post is pretty much so that I can link all of my future posts here, so if someone comes across my blog and this book interests them, they'll easily be able to get to my other posts about it.

I want this blog to serve as a sort of self help place for me, where I write about the things I'm doing to help keep my depression under control. Clutter and chaos contribute to my depression a lot. When things start to get out of control it almost instantly throws me into a deeper depression. When I organize a room or even just part of a room, I feel so much better, almost rejuvenated. I feel that if I can really get into organizing and staying on top of it, then I can drastically decrease the times I spend being deeply depressed.

Over the next year I'm sure I will have weeks or even whole months where I don't update about this, because we have so many changes coming up. My hope is that I can still come back to this little project when all of the dust settles each time we have a change, because I do think organizing and simplifying will help me a lot.

Week 1, Task 1: Write out your life vision

Things Have Improved

*Sigh* just reading my last post totally stressed me out! Things are getting much, much better. There are still some things causing me some stress, but I'm handling it much better and it's not quite so overwhelming. I started my second internship on time and it has been great. I really feel like I am learning so much. I've been doing really well in the class part of my internship, as well as the counseling class I am taking. I absolutely love my counseling class... love it! It's funny because through my internship I feel like I could really see myself working in gerontology, but then through my counseling class I'm drawn even more to the position of family and marriage therapist.

Therapy was my original goal when starting this degree program. Of course this would just be the first stepping stone to that career, or really any career, since I'm definitely going to need my bachelors and for many jobs, including therapy, will need a masters. So I have a lot of schooling ahead of me! In my last post I said I would be taking a long break from school, but this semester has been going so well that I think I will start up classes again as soon as we're settled at our new duty station.

Speaking of new duty stations, Michael has re-enlisted and we will be moving to Europe at the beginning of next year! Most likely Germany, but he was only able to specify "Europe" in his re-enlistment contract. His new ETS date is past his halfway to retirement point, so I guess we are in this for the long haul! Also, he will *hopefully* be here for Matilda's birth. He has submitted his leave packet and so far everything looks good, it just has to be made official. There has been a lot of stress surrounding that whole situation, but I'm just trying to relax and not stress out about it and we will just take action as it all unfolds.

I'm going to be 35 weeks pregnant tomorrow. So only another month of being pregnant, give or take a week or two. If Matilda comes as early as Adelaide did, then I will have a baby this month! I'm hoping she hangs on until August though because I think it'd be fun for their birthdays to be the first weeks of August, September, and October, lol.

Alright, this post is sort of all over and just a random update post, so I'll wrap it up here before I go on about too many more topics;).