I’m writing this on a bitterly cold January morning; temperatures hovering barely above zero and the wind chill factoring to about -15℉. My ten-minute walk to work left me with a wind-burned face and a nasty brain freeze. It is not conducive to a very optimistic mindset of grabbing the new year by its horns and showing it who’s boss.

As if that ever worked. (Haha, looking at you, 2020!)

Setting New Year’s Resolutions have never worked for me. Because while planning out your goals is admirable, it is impossible to wrangle the future into a tidy package. Maybe there is a way to carpe annem (seize the year?) without adding more work, stress and exhaustion to my routine, but I haven’t found it. It’s a hard enough challenge being a single adult human entering the third year of a pandemic.

I do understand the impulse to start the New Year with a clean slate, discover new things and make changes. This is the time when the inevitable opinion pieces start circulating about resolutions–to make or not to make them. Clean, pretty and inviting 2022 planners (not just your basic calendar) are now discounted at every store, and the methods of tracking progress are endless.

It makes sense. The year has yet to be written, literally, while the old year and all of its baggage can be trashed… or burned, depending on your mental state. We resolve for the year to be different, to be different. It would still be the case if we marked a “New Year” by the solstice or the equinox. You have to mark it somewhere, somehow.

But no resolutions?

Not in the traditional sense. The temptation to declare “I will [enter goal here]” is strong if you feel like you “failed” last year. But if the pressure is too heavy–e.g. I must do this or else–about a goal you don’t even care that much about, that doesn’t make you feel good, the resolution falls flat within a few short weeks. We burn ourselves out.

Setting goals should not take over my life. Week One of the new year should not about heaping a lot of extra work on my plate to achieve something I don’t wholeheartedly want in the first place. I know I am easily overwhelmed. I have goals, the same goals I’ve been working on and building towards for a while now. But they’re not goals that fit into a neat little checklist or have a specific timeline. They do not make up a giant list.

And I like that.

My goals aren’t about productivity but motivation; i.e. in writing. Why do I want to do this or keep doing this? How do I keep coming back? What do I truly want out of this? What would make this better?

A sense of “ritual.” As I was landing on this word, I coincidentally stumbled across a suggestion from Apartment Therapy to pick a “word of the year” instead of a resolution. I’m tickled that others are thinking along these lines. So “ritual” is my word of the year, or at least one of them. It is a kinder approach to a clean slate. One year. One small, new way of looking at things.

If you’ve ever followed Yoga with Adriene, Adriene often says, “Showing up is the hardest part.” And I find this applies to everything. The hardest part of getting up early in the morning and actually sitting down to write is… sitting down. Being there in the moment with a coffee and maybe a lit candle and a cat or two, is as equally important as typing new words onto the page.

The being there is what keeps me coming back. Not the word count and ultimately a manuscript-length document, although that’s a nice effect.

What do you even call this? It’s not much of a goal. It’s not terribly measurable. And it doesn’t mean I won’t be recording word counts and setting targets. It’s more of a mindset: to be show up, to restore meaning to the act of showing up, to find the joy in that. No pressure, no unending quest for perfection, no putting productivity above everything else.

That’s what I need this year: permission to show up and be.

Good luck on the journey that is 2022!

🎆