I love a new year! I love setting goals, making lists, organizing a new planner, setting intentions, formulating a plan of action. I am always hopeful that I will achieve my goals. I never actually do accomplish them all, but I almost always accomplish some of them. I print them out and tape them to the front of my planer, or sometimes to my bathroom mirror, to keep them in my mind past January 1.

By the way, in case you didn’t know, I love lists. And all of this requires lots of lists. I have a folder of goals set by my family, my brother’s family, and my sister’s family, going back to 2004. Twenty years of goals! How great is that? I am a goal and list nerd, and this makes me very happy.

On New Year’s Eve, my nephew and I were enjoying a conversation spurred by a box of Quotes and Questions, and we came across this quote that aligns with charting a course for a new year.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” ~Annie Dillard

It’s so easy to talk about how we want to live our lives later, not now. Right now, we’re watching a show or playing a video game, or scrolling on our phone, but that turns into our lives if we’re not paying attention.

The new year is a perfect time to pay attention.

I want to pay attention to writing, so I am writing this blog, will finish revising my new book, and start sending it out to agents (a horrible process filled with rejection, yet necessary). I want to complete some house projects we didn’t get to in 2024. And, like the rest of the world, I want to be healthier and more active.

I also like to have a word or a mantra to center around, yet I hadn’t come up with one until I was doing Yoga with Adriene on January 1, day one of her seven day Prana series, and she shared what may end up being my mantra for the year.

“Embrace the whole shebang.” ~Adriene

This reminds me of the wonderful Rumi poem, “The Guest House.” We are required to welcome it all…the good, the bad, and the ugly. I expect there to be plenty of bad and ugly this year (and for a number of years to come), yet it does not serve me to reject or ignore it. When things don’t go my way, when others don’t do what I want them to do, I want to challenge myself to embrace those moments as much as I do the happy, fun, relaxing, inspiring moments. I want to embrace the whole shebang. We’ll see…it feels highly aspirational!

I came across some notes I took during some class or other a few years ago, reframing new year’s resolutions into new year’s commitments. I noted the idea of “future-casting,” asking what you want your life to feel like and look like, what an ideal day looks like. My notes also remind me to choose behaviors and activities that I can begin immediately that are consistent with this bigger vision, to be motivated by this positive vision of my future self, remembering that I am the beneficiary of everything I do today. My notes also remind me to approach changes as an experiment, to see if a given choice does in fact move me in the direction I want to go, or if adjustments need to be made, rather than feeling shame about a failed experiment. I also noted the power of thinking about my values and what is important to me each and every day, and then trying to live in line with that.

So many possibilities in a new year! I hope that you and me both move in the direction that we have chosen.

Onward into 2025!