Do you make goals for your new year?
I’m one of those people who takes the last couple of weeks of the old year so she can look forward to the brand-new slate of a new year and dream and make goals and plan on the next year’s calendars she bought back in July. I look forward to this time with an almost giddy excitement.
Most years.
This year I found myself almost…apathetic about the whole process. Which is significantly out of character.
As a person who deals with clinical depression, anxiety, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I am accustomed to these ebbs and flows of emotion and mood. Sometimes it’s the season of year that brings on a depressive episode. Sometimes overwhelm sends me into a tailspin of obsession. Sometimes it’s completely unpredictable what sets off an anxiety attack or a mood. You mostly learn to live with them.
I had lots of things going on at the end of my year. My family’s schedule was almost laughably busy, in spite of my hard work and intention to make it less so. Family members and friends were dealing with heavy personal issues. It wouldn’t stop raining.
Whatever the reason for my apathy, I found myself at a loss. While I usually have no problem listing out new year’s goals for my career and my personal life and my fitness and my family unit, I couldn’t seem to focus enough to write down even one.
And then I read this from writer Anne Lamott: “I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life’s work.”
I thought that quote would make a perfect springboard for this year’s goals.
I broke my goals down into three parts:
Be here now.
As a task-oriented, always-planning person, this is one of the hardest parts of the equation for me (but I bet, by the end of this, I’ll say that about every piece). Anchoring myself to a moment is challenging.
My mind wanders two minutes into a ten-minute explanation from my sixteen-year-old on the new stuff he added to the video game he’s writing and designing. One question from one of my kids leads to a hundred different streams of thought firing in my brain. I have a busybody brain. Keeping it here, now, is a work in progress.
But I want to do more of that this year. I want to be here now. (At the end of this email, I’ll share some of the specific ways I’ll work to do that—and ways you might, too.)
Love as if your whole life depended on it.
Some days I feel like I do a good (enough) job loving the people in my life. Many days I feel like I fall short—which my therapist assures me is not true. I may fall short of my own standards, but I don’t fall short.
See, I have an unrealistic idea of what love is supposed to look like. It never gets angry at my children. It always supports my husband. It never thinks, I wish they would leave me alone so I could have a minute to myself.
But when we live in relationship with other people, there are bound to be moments when we’re so tired of each other’s company we could scream (into a pillow). When we annoy each other. When one of us says something we didn’t mean. Love is not perfect. And if I expect it to be, then I will never feel like I’m loving enough.
So I love the best way I can, as though my life depends on it.
And this is another layer to love: removing perfection from the love equation is a way I can better love myself.
Find your life’s work.
I am incredibly grateful that I have found my life’s work. Writing is my passion. It’s my purpose. It’s how I leave my mark on the world, spread love, and hopefully heal some of the broken places that exist in the lives of real people.
But I want to be excellent at that life’s work. I want to grow and constantly improve in it. I want to be teachable and recognize my weaker skills so I can work to strengthen them.
These seem like overarching goals that will take longer than a year. And of course they are and will. And that’s what finally excited me about this year’s goals: They reminded me that I’m a constant work in progress, that there’s always room for improvement.
That may seem daunting to some. But I’d argue it’s a cause for hope.
We live in a huge world that needs us all. There’s still work to be done. Let’s commit to doing it in the new year.
Here are some ways I’ll be working toward my goals this year.
1. Be here now
One of the ways I practice being in the moment is through meditation and yoga. Meditation trains the mind to focus in a distraction-heavy world. Yoga connects the mind, body, and breath to the moment.
While I practice long yoga sessions, I have yet to do a meditation session that lasts longer than ten minutes. So this year I’d like to try three-to-six 20-minute meditation sessions. (If you’re wondering what program/app I use, it’s Apple Fitness+. They offer both yoga and meditation with some amazing trainers, and they’re phenomenal sessions. Just don’t ask to see my crow pose…yet.)
2. Love
I want to practice healthier self-talk this year. You know the saying, “Don’t say anything to or about yourself that you wouldn’t say to or about a friend”? That’s never worked for me. My negative voices are incredibly negative..and persistent.
So this year I’ll be working on a cognitive behavior therapy technique that stops (or at least lessens the frequency and power of) the negative voices. Every time one harasses me, I’ll say (or think forcefully), STOP! And then What is actually true here? If it helps, I’ll journal my responses; sometimes my brain can be better tamed when I write. It’s very strong-willed.
3. Improve my life’s work
This year I’d like to practice writing shorter pieces. I dipped a toe into short-form writing at the end of last year, but I want to do more of it. And share more of it—which could be good or very bad for you, depending on how well or disastrous my experiments turn out to be.
Writing short fiction can help me improve one of my biggest struggles as a writer: tight plotting. Character, emotional journey, setting, dialogue—all of those things come easily for me. I have to work significantly harder at the external journey, plotting, and pacing. So I’m hoping short fiction will help me exercise those skills more consistently and help me grow in them.
What about you? What are some of your new year’s goals? How do you plan to execute them?
