I don’t set yearly resolutions in January. Too much can change during a year for me to know everything I want in Month One. I do have ongoing goals. Goals I can start Jan 1st or May 18th or Sept 21st. I don’t need to make them public (usually).
The one thing I do like to do at the change of the year is to look forward and consider who I want to be. Sometimes there are goals associated with these. Sometimes it is more than just a goal can achieve:
- I want to write more. Blogging. Novels. Short Stories. Hell, let’s try poems. I want to be a writer first. I want it to be one of the things everyone knows about me.
- Which means I need to be brave about my writing. I need to put the shit out in the flowerbed and hope I get some flowers. I have historically been a pretty thorough coward. I know that there are authors who have gotten published with writing worse than mine, but those aren’t the ones I compare myself to… and there is an Australian-sized piece of my brain that thinks I shouldn’t put anything out unless it compares to “them.”
- Get physical. Not get in shape. Healthy is nice. Certainly Healthy is important. I’ve been improving the diet thing. I’ve been cooking more and better foods… what I really need to figure out next is the physical thing. Running. Martial Arts. Morning Yoga. Hell, walking 5,000 every day is still on my to-do list. It’s more than a goal. It’s deeper than SMART because I know it is a change in lifestyle. Lifestyle changes are way harder than goals.
Those are the big ones. All three of them are bigger than just a goal. I could set a goal for 500, 1000, or 10,000 words a day… this is more than just one goal. It means figuring out how to turn off my day-job. Leave work at work. Turn off household chores. Stop thinking about it.
These aren’t goals. They aren’t resolutions. I’ve already started. But I have to keep going. Keep turning into the person I want to be.
Dream by Day 