Help Shape My New Year: You Can Pick My 2025 Goal!
I'm flummoxed. What intention should guide the new year? Let me hear your suggestions.
How do we want to wade into a new year? Some of you are polar-bear-plunge types, racing in, and other folks are going to dip a toe in, then wait and see. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, and yet we still have choices.
Some years are just about survival, of course. In the years of big losses, getting up and dressed is all the goal we need. And maybe not even getting dressed, now that people of all ages wear pajamas everywhere. (Note: this is cute when we’re young. When we’re older, it looks like we forgot to get dressed and need an intervention.)
A year when you move is all about finding your new grocery store, walking routes and library, plus meeting new neighbors. That’s enough.
In an ordinary year, it’s nice to have a guide. I’m guessing no one finished 2020 with all the things on the list they made with Gretchen Rubin’s 20 for 2020 challenge. Curious, that.
Our New Year’s resolutions are all the same: save more money, eat more vegetables, move more, stress less.
At the church, we offer star words, with a single word as a guide for thought during the year. Most words have more than one meaning, and they reveal different things throughout the year. I hang mine on my office door, so people can talk to me about my word, and theirs. My word for 2024 is pictured below. I didn’t really live up to its potential, and yet it kept calling me back.
Some friends choose their own word. You can write it out, or you can wear it every day.
Or, we can set specific goals. Last year, my husband and I wanted to redo our wills. We got as far as medical POAs and durable POAs. Adulting. My personal project in 2024 was to read children's books, and I read over 300 picture books, to my great joy.
How about 2025? How will you chart your course for a new year? And, what do you think my project should be?
This was my 2024 star word. It gave me a lot to ponder.
"Write!" Not just what I'm paid to write but what I want to write as well. And this year I want to write short stories. I've published more than a dozen books in the past 20 years and only one short story. This year that streak ends. Mary, I would not presume to tell you what your word should be. Oh, WTH, okay I will: "Continue." Continue being the sensitive, caring , talented, courageous person you are and writing the way/things you write.
I'm taking the word "trust". Trust that somehow things will work out for the best. With all the uncertainty and anxiety over the election and what's to come I need to trust that God will provide a guiding hand to help me manage the problems, pitfalls, and challenges.
For you, Mary, I am suggesting "unexpected". Even though you plan in advance and like having your days set out for you, I think it would be good to realize there will be many unexpected happenings and surprises. The unexpected twists and turns coming up we know from the years of 2016-2020. But there will also be unexpected surprises to enable us to cope with these annoying and even disgusting situations.