Every year I write a post discussing my selected “theme” for the coming New Year. Every year I go back and read the previous years’ “theme” posts and reflect on them. In looking back today, I realized I never did post a theme for 2017. I think I wrote one but it was on my laptop that died and in the process of getting my new computer, the post was never retrieved and posted. Somehow that’s fitting because 2017 was what can best be described as a “shit-show” of a year for me and mine. No matter what theme I might have had in mind, it would have been blown to hell by a myriad of set-backs, hard times, illnesses, losses, and more. I’ve spent the better part of 2017 as a care-giver in one capacity or another to my parents and my husband and all their health issues and crises, to a few friends, as well as being a mom to Punky. We have dealt with a ton of health issues, a disability, a job loss, huge financial burdens, a stalker, and impending death this year and there’s no real end in sight right now. To be honest I was seriously thinking about not doing a theme for the coming year either as very little of the aforementioned “shit-show” has resolved itself and the world at large seems like a very gloomy, destined-to-implode place right now. Then a friend quoted Captain Picard to me: “It is possible to do everything right and still lose”. I sunk down into that quote for a couple of days, bemoaning in the truth of it actually. And then I came upon this quote by Robert Brault:

"Everything we possess that is not necessary for life or happiness becomes a burden, and scarcely a day passes that we do not add to it."

