About ten years ago now, I got tired of the endless "You don't DO New Year's Resolutions?" questions filling up most of December AND January, and got so heartily sick of explaining that I sat down and boiled my answers down to ONE sentence:
A New Year's Resolution is a NOT, and once you've broken the streak, it's very difficult to think of the total days working with it as a POSITIVE total.
So I switched it up: every year about this time, I start sorting through a mental skill and a physical skill I want to master (or at least manage, let's be honest!)
One year the mental skill was Welsh. I learned about a thousand words, my pronunciation sucked, and having a grand total of ONE fellow student to speak with taught me an awful lot about the way I do NOT learn a language. SNERK.
One year the physical skill was to walk a balance beam 6' without falling, tripping, or spraining something. I started on Jan 1, walking a 6' length of 2*2 lying flat on the ground. (Yes I used a level to check.) I didn't manage it until some time in October.
But even if I'd gotten to December 31 and ONLY managed to go four feet without a mishap, that was LITERALLY four feet farther than I could manage at the beginning.
Just another way of looking at the year, and setting "resolutions" or "mission statements."
Not quite a mission statement
A New Year's Resolution is a NOT, and once you've broken the streak, it's very difficult to think of the total days working with it as a POSITIVE total.
So I switched it up: every year about this time, I start sorting through a mental skill and a physical skill I want to master (or at least manage, let's be honest!)
One year the mental skill was Welsh. I learned about a thousand words, my pronunciation sucked, and having a grand total of ONE fellow student to speak with taught me an awful lot about the way I do NOT learn a language. SNERK.
One year the physical skill was to walk a balance beam 6' without falling, tripping, or spraining something. I started on Jan 1, walking a 6' length of 2*2 lying flat on the ground. (Yes I used a level to check.) I didn't manage it until some time in October.
But even if I'd gotten to December 31 and ONLY managed to go four feet without a mishap, that was LITERALLY four feet farther than I could manage at the beginning.
Just another way of looking at the year, and setting "resolutions" or "mission statements."