I haven't made any New Year's resolutions. But I do have life resolutions... I make them every night before I go to bed. That tomorrow I will do better, be a better person, live my life a little better. Then, in the morning, life happens to me and more often than not my focus is just on getting through... until at last it is time to go to bed. And then, THEN, I resolve once more that tomorrow will be different. That, tomorrow, the rest of my life will begin.
I don't mean to be all defeatist and negative. Because there are some, a very few, days when I actually do manage to inch forward that tiny, tiny step. So I am not where I was a year ago. But the last couple of years have been very hard. I have been walking into the wind and for all my efforts I sometimes feel I have not moved at all.
My daddy died just over a year ago. That doesn't convey how very raw it still is. It has been 14 months. 14 months since the loudest, biggest, most ebullient person I have ever met stopped being. The thing about my father was, he drove me nuts. He drank too much, had too many obnoxious opinions, demanded that everything was done his way and when he wanted it done, and insisted I watch the most ridiculous 1950s police dramas and spaghetti westerns. We argued bitterly on occasion. And I loved him. And I miss him.
It was my daddy who gave me my passion for wilderness... for leaving the beaten track and wading through hip deep heather to find a particular rock or dip in the ground that, for him and later for me too, explained the entire landscape. We walked in the Lake District - up mountains guided by Wainwright's sketches and notes... books that still sit on the shelf, annotated with my father's own observations. We walked in Scotland... on one occasion, memorable for all the wrong reasons, we attempted and abandoned a circumnavigation of the Isle of Arran. But most of all, we walked, and camped, on Dartmoor. And it is there I feel him most: every path I walk I cross a path I have walked before with him. Every photo I take is a view he would have loved.
So this past year has really been about coming to terms with that sudden void in my life. Not to mention the silence in my home, now both my youngest children have left for university, and the realisation that I am now 50 and am really truly supposed to be grown up now.
And hence, Over The Hill. This started as an accompaniment to videos I took of my wanderings, back when we thought dad would get better. It was a way of sharing with him. And I haven't posted, either on the blog or YouTube, since he left us...
Now, though. Now is the time to make changes, to let the plans that have been brewing in the back of my mind for the past year, become an actuality. It is scary. It is exciting.
So. No New Year's Resolution. Just an everyday resolution: to do better. To make it count. To live my life, instead of marking time.