This past Mercury Retrograde really threw me. I hadn’t even noticed that it was going to go Retrograde in my 6th house of Work/Health, which is probably why I was surprised I was sick and overworked for pretty much all of it! Ironically I only started feeling back to my normal energy level last Wednesday after Mercury went Direct. Before then, my head was foggy and my energy level so low I did nothing of the holiday revelry that others have this holiday season. Now that I’m back in action, however, with only 5 days left before Christmas, I feel completely behind the 8-ball! I’ve been scrambling to get presents and feeling like this should be early December, not less than two weeks away from 2012!

I always loved school for the sense of completion it gave; you took a class, worked hard, got a good grade, and then the class was over. Until you took another one! But life is not like school in that lessons do not come pre-packaged with a syllabus and homework reading, no one is really monitoring your progress except yourself, and there’s no teacher to give you a gold star or an A for important accomplishment or an official Transcript!

Which is why, I shouldn’t really be so hard on myself that I have an unfinished holiday ornament wreathe on my wall. I began to decorate my apartment early this year, by Nov. 19th in fact! I was having a get together and wanted to have some pre-holiday cheer. It was a good thing I did, given that I never really got around to completely finishing the ornament ball I made. If you look closely you can see that for the upper right area I ran out of ornaments but I simply put the darn thing up anyways! I figured I would get around to finishing it before the holidays.

That hasn’t happened, but I realize that in fact, it’s OK to have unfinished projects and goals in life. In fact, it’s more than OK! Because if my house were perfectly clean I might have too much time on my hands, and if I finished every project or book I tried to read, I might not start anything or certainly would curtail my personal growth in a lot of areas. They always say it’s OK to fail because you learn from your failures, but I’d like to point out this holiday season that it’s OK to not finish everything you start. To leave something for later. I always think that I’m going to have time to organize my CD collection, but the truth is, it may never get organized (and at a certain point you have to ask, since all my music is digitized now anyways, do I really even need to organize it?).

So as I review 2011 and think about my accomplishments and resolutions that I did achieve and the ones that I did not, I contemplate the unfinished holiday ornament wreathe on my wall, and think “It’s OK that I didn’t get it all done in 2011. There is always tomorrow!”