We are more than a week into January  So how’s it going with your resolutions?

Never mind that many folks have just spent the previous month in overdrive; no matter what holidays you may or may not celebrate, December can be a bit of a crazy daze. Scrambling to get work done before the end of the year. Pressure to get finances in order. Sweet but rambunctious children out of school and needing attention. Family travel when it is most expensive, crowded, and prone to weather delays. Many many gatherings even at a time when we may want to hibernate and are still facing prospects of contagion. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, days are shorter and often cold. By the time we get to the final week of the year, we often just want to crawl into bed. Some of us do.

And then a new year begins. The arbitrary date that transitions between one year and the next brings with it the hope of the future and a reflection on the past. Yet, for some reason, that reflection is often tinged with disappointment and regret for what we didn’t do, what we didn’t achieve, who we wished we had become but didn’t. That is the frame of mind with which we often go into thinking about resolutions. We are surrounded by a pressure to create resolutions for the new year. The old faithful - losing weight, exercising more, eating better, giving up smoking, getting a new job. Those of us who are in creative practice might vow to devote more time to our work, finish something by a deadline, start or expand a side hustle, network, apply for more grants, get more commissions, do something that will make up for what we didn’t do last year. And we must start right away.

Sigh.

I have always liked understanding the origins of words. I recently looked up resolution and was surprised by its original meaning. It comes from Latin and Old French to mean the process of loosening something, breaking into parts, reducing things into simpler forms. What a gamechanger! It made me realize that making a list of all the things I want to change about myself and my output is not really a resolution. It’s more of a recipe for resentment. What if we thought of this time of year as a time for four other R’s?

Reflection

After the madness of December and still in the throes of wintertime, it seems like this is the perfect time not to go full throttle into resolutions our bodies and brains aren’t ready for. Is it no wonder that many religions, pagan traditions and even the zodiac year tend to consider the spring equinox as the time of new beginnings rather than the middle of winter? 

This time is meant to slow down, to rest, to reflect, to ponder. 

We don’t need to have unachievable checklists against which we must measure our worth. We don’t need to constantly compare our achievements to others. We certainly don’t need to honor the hype of commercialism that supports whole industries of self-improvement. When we take time and space to reflect, it gives us a chance to see things in a bigger context, our own context. 

In terms of our actions we can take after reflection, here are three:

Retention

In the past year, you have moved forward in different ways in your creative practice and your life more broadly. This could certainly mean you have produced output. It could mean that you have had some achievements that are the kind we are conditioned to celebrate, such as completing a project, financial gain or public admiration. It could mean you have had some achievements that may be known only to you - traversing a difficult bout with a creative block, gaining confidence with a new style or medium, or working with some kind of consistency. Celebrate all these kinds of achievements. Think about what made a difference to helping them happen. How can you continue and build on those in the new year?

Reduction

Now reflect on what wasn’t necessarily working for you? Were you overly stressed by too many deadlines? Were you putting all your eggs in the basket of things beyond your control? Were you so focused on monetizing your work that you started to lose passion for it? Did you say yes to too many things that didn’t really move your soul or your development forward? Did you spend a lot of time negatively comparing yourself to others? Did you give up valuable time honing your craft or developing new skills to things that don’t really matter? What can you reduce in your life that may be distracting you or holding you back?

Reboot

Instead of kicking ourselves for what we haven’t achieved or become by making unrealistic resolutions, what if instead we made small adjustments, part of that loosening and simplifying that is at the heart of the meaning of resolution? One year, instead of making resolutions, I just settled on one maxim: “Reboot annoyance into amusement.” This was a way for me to take back some control over things over which I had no power. If I engaged with someone or a situation that would normally make me exasperated, I decided I would step back and try to look at it with a sense of wonder and humor. This can be done with our creative process too. Instead of regretting what we haven’t done, we can reflect on what we have done that are small steps towards moving forward. What works? What perhaps needs an adjustment, a reboot? 

An Example

Last year at this time, I shared how I had created my Wins of the Year jar as a way to capture a win from every week and then look back on them at the end of the year. 

I tried doing that again this year. Two things I noticed: (1) I almost never wrote Wins of the Week on my whiteboard; (2) Even coming up with a Win of the Week to write down for the jar was sometimes challenging. Some weeks I forgot to write something down. One time, after going many weeks without throwing something in the jar, I wrote several down for the past few weeks. It felt like cheating. By the time we got to November, I just stopped writing any Wins of the Week at all. It felt like a hassle, a cute exercise, but not something that was actually helping me move forward.

What had changed from the prior year? Not much beyond the fact that life was a bit busier and less routine. Maybe this was an exercise that made a lot of sense for me in the height of the pandemic. It helped me reflect on days which, on the surface, didn’t seem that different from each other. It helped me celebrate novelty, small wins, and realizing that the wins come in different flavors.

So it was with a bit of reticence that I emptied the 2022 jar this past weekend. While, in my mind, this had become a useless exercise, I went through with the process anyway. If nothing else, maybe I could reboot my annoyance into amusement.

But then I decided to reboot the process. Each time I read one of my Wins of the Week, I decided to retype it and organize them chronologically. 

Looking back at the year showed an acknowledgment of challenges. I didn’t win the essay contest. I didn’t get the promotion at work. Most of my book proposals to potential agents were met with crickets. Instead of looking at this as failure or giving up, I simply recalibrated my expectations and redirected my efforts. Reboot! 

Revisiting these wins was also an acknowledgment that my focus this year could not be entirely on my art. I was dealing with getting my mom’s home ready for market while holding down a full-time job, finishing up my book, and navigating the anxieties of resuming “normalcy” while still in the midst of a pandemic. Now that I have made it through some milestones, I can redirect more of my time and energy to creative pursuits in the coming year. Reduce!

Seeing this list of wins also reminded me of the importance of having rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation, whether through taking day trips or vacations, spending time in nature, or simply seeing friends or enjoying a book by the public pool. These are keepers for the coming year. Retain!

While I stopped recording the Wins of the Week before the year was out and am not yet sure if I will continue them, I realize now that there is still a value in having an exercise like this. Instead of being stressed by the prospect of having to come up with a win every week, I am using some of this not-quite-ready-for-resolutions time to consider how I can reboot this exercise to make it feel less of a chore and more something that can reinvigorate me to move my work forward. Reflect!

I am open to suggestions on what works for you .

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