Last year around this time, I made honest “new year’s resolutions” for the first time in my adult life. I tried to follow the advice of goal setting gurus: making them reasonable and achievable; blending short- and long-term timelines; balancing aspiration and realism. I put real care and consideration into a list of 10 items, and treated them as commitments to myself. Despite taking the enterprise seriously, I was still surprised at how helpful I actually found the exercise to be. I have never been a goal setter. This was unexplored territory to me. But checking in regularly with myself throughout the year (a year in which I faced more “big picture” life moments than perhaps any year previous) and weighing decisions against my resolutions actually helped me a great deal. As a new year rolls over once again, I want to revisit those goals – Socrates and the unexamined life and all that. I want to assess my success (or lack thereof), revise and recommit.
Looking Back
Here is how I did in 2018:
10. Go outside.
I began the year working in the sales job I had been in for a while, and I could feel the sedentary nature of office life slowly crushing me. There were days where it felt like I was drowning, where the lack of fresh air, creativity, and reprieve from stress would push me to crushing depths. Then, against all expectation, a dream opportunity presented itself. Just as I was reaching the inevitable impasse where I needed to leave my corporate job or risk real damage to my mental health, I was given the opportunity to go outside. I took a job coordinating the Outdoor Education program at the camp I had worked at growing up. Angela and I (in a moment of incredible support from my amazing wife) uprooted ourselves and moved with our dog to a children’s camp so that I could follow a lifelong dream. Immediately, so much felt better. I lost weight, I felt healthy, I breathed fresh air. I went outside.
9. Read more poetry.
I tried. I really did. I didn’t do well reading poetry anthologies or books (or books in general, really – of the measly 23 books I read in 2018, only 2 were books of poetry), but I tried to fill my “spaces” with more poetry. I followed a number of poetry accounts on Instagram and Twitter, so that as I indulged my media addiction and trudged through the cesspools of the social internet, I could at least count on the terrible news being broken up periodically with beauty. It has been a small measure, but it has helped.
8. Write more poetry.
This I did unequivocally. Admittedly, I am very much a novice poet. I wrote a few years ago about coming back to poetry after being turned off of it by the way it is taught in the Canadian school system. The delight that rediscovering poetry has brought me cannot be overstated. It is like candy for my soul. I am unfailingly poor at evaluating my own work, but I strongly suspect that most poetry I write is awful. I am never sure what to do with it – do I post it here? Do I continue to collect it and edit it in hopes that someday someone else might publish it? Do I just write for myself and let it live in Moleskine notebooks? I do not know. What I do know is that I wrote a fair bit this past year, and that I don’t want to stop.
7. Blog. Weekly.
As pleased I am with my success in my last goal, I am equally disappointed in my lack here. Granted, I could not see at the outset of last year the adventures that would be in store – the ways in which real life would simply take priority. I neglected blogging for many reasons. I was busy, I wrote other things, I felt I had nothing worthwhile to say. In the end, I don’t think having a regular posting schedule is particularly helpful for me. It works for some, no doubt. My lack of a cohesive theme or regular “series” of posts doesn’t play easily into posting with such regimented regularity. Certainly having more discipline around writing is something I need to work on if I ever want a real shot at writing professionally, but for now I think I am okay with posting in this space when I have something to say. That being said, I have a couple of projects in mind which I think this may in fact be the right space for, so I hope to have more content up in the coming months.
6. Recharge.
As I said above, I have seldom felt better. There are still days where I feel worn down by it all, and many days I am exhausted beyond belief – but in general, it is the exhaustion of having given myself to something I care deeply about. I had forgotten how good that can feel.
5. Be careful.
It is hard to measure the amount of care I have brought to relationships, decisions, and myself over the past year, but I am conscious of having tried. I have endeavoured to be literally “full of care” this year, and I hope I have succeeded.
4. Get something published.
As with writing, I feel that this particular goal fell victim to a lack of focus. I had every intention of resuming the practice of submitting things I have written to accepting publications, but I simply didn’t do it. Nobody can publish your writing if they don’t see it. If memory serves, I only tried to shop around a single piece this year (the Universal Language of Hide and Seek, which I ended up publishing here) and quickly became discouraged by its lack of an audience. As will become clear in my 2019 goals, I think that my best writing ultimately comes when I stop writing for an audience and simply write what I want to read. But I also need to do the work.
3. Listen to more diverse voices.
This is perhaps the goal which was most omnipresent in my mind throughout 2018. I wrote a series of posts early in the year examining the composition of “Top 100” book lists from major media organizations, and it was impossible to ignore the lack of diversity in what we typically associate with “greatness”. I have tried all year to seek out new and underrepresented voices to broaden my context and understanding, whether in media or literature or music and beyond. This is something I am committed to doing well beyond this year, as I can feel the marked difference it has made in my outlook.
2. Be content.
Contentment is the pervasive thread throughout any of the success I have found over the past year. Choosing happiness over status or wealth or complacency has sparked every positive change I have made these past months. Being content has enabled me to be other things as well – productive, present, and grateful.
1. Learn to say the sentence, “I don’t know enough about that to have formed an opinion.”
This is something I will continue to work on my whole life, and probably still never be as good at it as I should. In a world where anyone can find an audience online and shout their feelings into the void, it is extraordinarily difficult to show restraint. It is hard to take time to read the article instead of the headline, to find the middle path instead of choosing a side, to wait for enough data to make an informed decision. I will keep trying to find the humility and diplomacy to admit when I don’t have a strong enough opinion to defend, and to seek deeper arguments.
Looking Ahead
Having looked back, it is time to take what I have learned and look ahead. Here are the things I hope to accomplish, and the objectives to which I hope to hold myself, in 2019:
10. Recommit to reading.
9. Write something every day.
8. Get up early.
7. Create for myself, not a market.
6. Do fewer things with more care.
5. Check in.
4. Invest as much time into Canadian issues as I do American politics.
3. Celebrate the successes of others.
2. Be present.
1. Figure out fatherhood.
An Awfully Big Adventure 