There's something
about the change of one (or perhaps two, & once in my lifetime, 4) digits of the calendar that urges most
of us to make promises to ourselves.
They tend to be well intentioned promises - lose weight, eat better,
love more, live more, do something crazy ad infinitum.
I've done this
for as many years as I can consciously remember. It seems like a peer-pressure
thing - I'd get asked what my new year resolutions were. The person doing the
questioning would usually have a dozen of his/her own that they wanted to
share. Not to be outdone, I'd make up a bunch of my own, with about as much
hope of achievement as a wisp of smoke in a hurricane.
As I grow older
though, I find myself making tweaks to my ongoing plans & systems. As Scott Adams says, a system is better than
a goal - it's more likely that I will
achieve what motivated me to set the system in place in the first place.
My routine
changed in the last two weeks of 2015 - I switched off my computers for most of
the waking day, focusing on doing physical things. Helping my wife with her
garden. Repairing & restoring stuff. Reading a book. Talking to the kids.
Playing games. Reading an occasional blog on my phone. Restricting the intake
of food & drink during a season devoted to excesses. Sleeping longer (&
not wearing a fitbit to monitor it). Noticing my thoughts. Writing longer
entries in my journal. Reading old journal entries. Rearranging. Cleaning.
Discarding. Rearranging. Redecorating. Reliving old memories.
And in the midst
of all this, I remembered a decision I made a while ago to stop posting to this
blog. I had forced myself to post every day, & did so meticulously for a
year. Then ennui set in. It seemed like a pointless exercise. So I stopped. The
posts were links to stuff I read & found interesting. But there wasn't much
I had written.
Writing is
cathartic for me. I write in my journals, or on blank sheets of paper. I use a
fountain pen. There's an element of control. My arm moves. The ink flows out.
Words are formed. Ideas come to life. Or die.
Resolutions happen at that moment for me. The act of writing things
down.
Different
context, but "Stop writing everything down" are among the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song that's playing in the background as I wrote those last six
words.
