After a long road, three months that felt more like three years in a good way, I am back to the slower and chiller island life. I’ve taken a break from both research and barista work to really focus on getting some serious writerly things done.

Among those things are getting some eBooks formatted and on the market, preparing to attend a really important workshop with the Writers of the Coast in Oregon, and honing my professional relationships and habits.

Focus. That’s the key these next few months. Getting back into patterns. Establishing the things I need and want to accomplish over the next year.

Also, getting physically in shape. Biking and swimming, running possibly, hopefully muay thai kickboxing. And a good healthy dose of veg after all that sugar and junk in Japan and Korea. (Seriously, your awesome bakeries! Just stop. Because I can’t!)

I’m hoping, even, to get back on a blogging schedule. It’s been years since I had some regularity. But it’s kind of part of the overall scheme to take myself a little more seriously every year. So, here we go.

In silly personal news, I finally was able to master the hula hoop. And by “master” I mean “accomplish”. It was a big moment, not in that the hula hoop is very important. But rather, in this sense.

I stood there with my failed attempts and kept repeating to myself: “I just don’t get it. What am I doing wrong? I don’t understand.”

Then, it clicked. That mentality, right there, was the problem. So, I stopped telling myself I couldn’t understand, picked up the hula hoop, said, “Rei. You know what the problem is. You know how this works. It’s simple. Speed and timing and the right kind of motion. You got this. Now, go!”

And there it went. Round and round and round, until I chose to stop. And it felt good. Because I hadn’t just swung a silly plastic hoop around my waist. But I’d learned that if I stop putting myself down — I can do things. Just about anything, I bet.

And that, my friends, is 2017 in my eyes.

Time for flight. Time to try.

Time to stop telling ourselves we can’t.

Because we can.

I know it now.

So, grab your symbolic hula hoops, my good old friends, pick your chin up, and go!

<3 RR