Happy New Year, friends!
It's time to assess how I did upholding last year's resolutions and set some intentions for the new year.
As I noted in my last post, as I tried to come up with resolutions for this year I got a bit waylaid reflecting on the bizarre, accelerated time sensation that accompanied the past year. Now that I'm reattempting my annual resolutions post, I again find myself struggling with this task.
It's not just that it feels oddly too soon to be doing this again, but also that I feel the weight of the constraints of the past year that I expect to persist into the next year, especially as we still wait for a clarity on when children under 5 can be vaccinated against COVID-19. It's not that nothing can be accomplished in a year when I expect to still be working and parenting with no consistent support beyond Husband, but the fact of the matter is the menu of options is considerably limited. I want to be realistic and kind in my ambition for this year, without setting my sights so low that they're depressingly resigned to the year being dominated by its difficulties and limitations.
With that in mind, I'll start as I always do, with an assessment of my success in meeting each of last year's resolutions, which were:
1. Keep developing family traditions and learning about family heritage.
I'm reasonably happy with how I participated in this resolution, although it was pretty uneven. As with last year, a lot of the Scandinavian traditions I stuck to this year happen in the last weeks of the year. I have some ideas for including some additional holidays in the spring and summer, but I haven't actually put those into action yet.
I truly don't understand what the holdup is with practicing Swedish (or, for that matter, refreshing my retention of French) via that one adorable app I still do love. I just haven't been consistent with it for some time now.
That said, we've also exposed our Child to a decent amount of Dutch, which is consistent with Husband's heritage, including via a charming Dutch children's show!
2. Invest in my home.
I operationalized this resolution with the following more specific goals:
--Nesting.
--Supporting local institutions and businesses.
--When it's safe, exploring more.
I'm also relatively happy with my success on this resolution, although that success is variable across those three metrics. We've made some nice enhancements to our home, including some more routine maintenance as well as finally figuring out that you can just order frames from various businesses on the internet. I'm also liking the consistent routines Husband and I have gotten into for the daily maintenance of keeping a home, including cleaning, pet care, and cooking. I've been finding it really satisfying to purposefully and regularly care for our home.
Two unexpected gains from this year are that I've been finding it really rewarding to cultivate house plants and start cooking more. I've learned several recipes from Husband, as well as from TikTok and recipes loved ones have recommended, and I've been finding it really satisfying and efficacy-enhancing to know that I can help feed our family.
My path into house plantery was much more haphazard. We've had maybe a half dozen plants around for a few years now, including the ones I thankfully brought home from my office before the beginning of our seemingly infinite quarantine, and when we moved into our new home the previous owners left behind a lot of gardening gear and a sweet little spider plant. Over the last few years, I've been increasingly attentive to when our plants have outgrown their pots, need a top-up of soil, or have propagated and need to be split up into multiple pots. Once I repotted our left-behind spider plant into a bigger pot and learned that the mini-plants dangling from a spider plants tendrils are ridiculously easy to propagate into more plants, I became a little bit obsessed.
3. Build a practice of sustainable antiracist civic engagement.
I'm pretty happy with my engagement with this past year's approach to antiracism in the form of monthly accountability posts. I didn't perfectly adhere to my goal, but I did write posts most months and I covered a nice range of topics. While I don't think that's sufficient in terms of antiracist work, I'm glad there's at least one aspect of that work I've been able to sustain pretty consistently during a really difficult year.
4. When possible, dedicate time to my interests and hobbies.
These included, with their degree of success noted:
--Reading: yes!
--Meditation (including learning more mindfulness and self-compassion practices): barely!
--Learning (including about therapeutic techniques): sometimes?
--Writing: yes!
I've read some books I really enjoyed this year, and I'm really grateful to reconnect with reading after a serious hiatus after Child was born. I'm sad that meditation is simply not a part of my life right now, and I'm not sure how to consistently reclaim it--it was something I did first thing in the morning before Child was born, and that just doesn't work with our mornings now. I've actually been excited about several continuing education options I want to pursue, but it's hard to make time for that outside of other work and life commitments. And thankfully, because of this blog, I've been able to keep writing consistently throughout the year.
5. Watch 52 movies.
Very thankfully: success!
Okay, so now to the somewhat daunting task of setting goals for this year. I already anticipate perhaps setting fewer resolutions, which is fine--that will be easier to keep track of, and reflective of my intention to be reasonable and kind in my expectations of myself in this new year.
So here I go.
1. Practice and maintain healthy boundaries.
Upholding this resolution will require a variety of labor, including concerted self-study and recovery work and actively committing to the things that keep me healthy.
Honestly, it makes me anxious to not have an explicit blanket resolution about fun things / leisure pursuits like I did last year. That anxiety in and of itself is illustrative of my need for this resolution to have boundaries. If I was confident I could maintain sufficient boundaries that there would be consistent space for the things that sustain me and make me happy, it would probably be redundant to have a resolution to do those things--I would just be doing them, because I protected my energy and time enough to be able to do them. So, apparently, one of the ways I'll be able to ascertain if I was successful in achieving this resolution is that I will have continued to read, cook, care for my plants, decorate my home, enjoy my pets and family, etc.
My first step in this resolution is to decide what exactly I want to accomplish this year that would show me that I've been keeping up with the introspection and healing work I've started this year. I may not share the content of those goals here, but I'm hoping I set those goals by the end of the month if not this long weekend.
Another step is that I need to make some damn doctor's appointments. Maybe saying that here will finally get me to pull the trigger on scheduling things.
2. Meditate most days.
It really does make me sad to have lost touch with this practice over the last two years, and I really want it back in my life. I'm probably going to need to let go of my attachment to my meditation practice looking exactly like it did in the before-Child-times, which has been harder to do than I expected. I'm hoping the way this resolution nicely complements my first will help push me through my resistance and into a new, regular approach to meditation.
3. Write at least twice a month.
While writing is absolutely something fun and I'm therefore a bit contradicting what I said in the rationale for my first resolution, I also think that this, my blog, is an important place to have accountability for this goal. I really liked committing to writing monthly antiracist posts in addition to movie posts, so I plan to make those antiracist accountability posts a part of my writing commitment this year, as well. I'm also still wanting to write more frequent short posts on movies--I have a very much yet-to-be-realized dream of writing a post for every movie I watch, which would be so fun!--and I know it will take time for me to let go of the perfectionistic tendencies that make it hard to keep things brief, but I'm hoping I can make still more headway on that goal.
4. Watch 52 movies.
My forever goal.
It really was a stroke of not-actually-genius genius to give myself permission to rewatch movies and still count them in my total. It's been so helpful to be able to do that for self-care reasons. I'm now considering it just a part of the deal that the annual goal is to watch 52 movies, not 52 *new* movies.
So there we have it, dear friends. I'm looking forward to sharing the year ahead with you.
{Heart}
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