Yes for the new year

Tis the season for New Years resolutions, a tradition I firmly support but feel a bit flummoxed by this year. Maybe it's because the timing is off. As a teacher, my new year started in August and was duly accompanied by a flurry of heartfelt goal-setting in the January 1 vein, such as exercising regularly, eating right and not working all the damn time. And, now that it's the official new year, I can look back on said resolutions with a sense of accomplishment. I'm doing Bikram yoga 4-5 times a week every week I'm in town, have been eating reasonably well (excellently, if you don't count the frozen burritos for lunch almost every day) and have arrived at a work-life balance that might strike non-teachers as pitiful, but has me throwing myself a metaphorical party every time I think about it. Not that my life isn't in constant need of the kind of renewal things like resolutions inspire, but I'm humming along fairly well with the ones I have.

This is new for me. This year is definitely the first time in my life I've worked on my resolutions well into the equivalent of May (since I set my goals in August rather than January). Something major has shifted since returning from the desert, and being able to fulfill personal objectives is only one of the benefits. I was thinking about this today while Facebooking with a friend, a teacher at another charter school in our network. This friend, let's call her Superstar, spent last semester working on her masters thesis, TAing a graduate class and teaching full time. Her TA job has ended, but she was bemoaning the fact that the time ("time") she now has was already being filled with other commitments at her school. "There always seems to be something, and it's so hard to say no," she reported grimly--and I heard an echo of my own voice across the years. I knew Superstar was right: there will always be something. When your job involves serving others in an environment of scarcity and great need (ie: urban education), there will always be demands--and not just any demands: worthy, necessary, pressing demands. Demands that keep you awake at 2 a.m. and cause you not so much to say yes alot as to become a living, breathing yes to all comers. Which actually works for awhile and makes a lot of worthy, wonderful people happy. Until it becomes all you are. Then you're more like a not-breathing, living-dead yes zombie. Not surprisingly, that's when the problems start.

I realized as I read Superstar's message that I knew one of the ways out of this trap. You might know, too. You might be sitting at your computer, talking to the screen, as people do while watching horror movies. But instead of, "Don't walk into the dark, creepy room, you dumbass!" you might instead be saying, "Are you serious? Just tell those people no already!" The comparison to a horror movie is apt, given what can happen to a person who turns into a living-dead yes zombie, but--just like in the movies--it's not that simple. I could have told Superstar to buck up, say no, put your foot down, etc. But I suspected that wouldn't work. It didn't work on me in the slightest. I thought saying no was for people who didn't care enough to say yes.

So instead of telling Superstar to say no, I told her what worked for me (finally...it only took a year on anti-depressants and two years on the other side of the world). It's the same thing that's helped me keep my New (school) Years resolutions. She shouldn't start saying no; she should keep saying yes. Saying no is like standing still--the vacuum of unoccupied free time (as small as it is) remains, and nature abhors a vacuum. Saying yes always fills the vacuum. But Superstar shouldn't say yes to more demands on her time. Instead, she should say yes to ways that will help her feel more like herself and less like a living-dead yes zombie. That's what Bikram yoga did for me. My New Years resolutions were the right kind of yeses. At last. And once you start saying yes, as we all know, it's hard to stop.

When you think about it, that's what having a work-life balance is all about. It's not about having "time for me" cause, really, what does that mean? It's about achieving a balance between yeses to others and yeses to myself.

This is hardly breaking news. The self-help section at Borders is surely full of books that all say the same thing. But the emphasis on yes rather than no made a huge difference in making my new year happy, and it might for you, too. Here's to saying the right kind of yes in 2011!