The new year is all about resolutions and starting over. I’m not a big fan of resolutions – I don’t know that they work. It’s not the resolutions’ fault, but perhaps the way we learned to do them.

A little background: I am also a yoga teacher. I teach other fitness classes, and every single January I count down until there are space to park again – usually by the beginning to middle of February. With the pandemic, it’ll be different. I’m rarely at the one with such huge parking issues, and my single class I still teach there is not at a peak time. But everyone who works there gets accustomed to the rhythm of never being able to park in January. Most people have fulfilled their mind’s resolution of working out by then, whether a few times or a few weeks, then they’ve moved on to other concerns.

One of my yoga teacher friends always advocated for intentions rather than resolutions. Her reasoning said an intention was something you could keep working toward, and a resolution was something that you could simply finish by doing it once.

My writer friends always promote SMART goals instead of resolutions: Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. Time-bound.

I’ve been considering my goals. Sometimes I’m not certain what next year will bring. Maybe life will become more like The Times Before- but not right away. I know I had not posted in this blog for some time. It’s been hard to come back to it, to make time for a public face.

While I’m struggling with what I want to accomplish and the number of hours in a given day, I’m also prioritizing. I haven’t been taking on much that’s new, because I’ve been overwhelmed just keeping up with what I’ve managed.

When it’s quiet, I’ve been finding what I want to keep and what I’m ready to stop dragging along with me. Sometimes it’s surprising what I find in that stillness.

One thing I often forget to do with my goals is measure them, and continue to measure them throughout the year. So that’s one of the ways this year’s goals will change, to measure the things that I’d like to accomplish and maybe measure some of the things I do that don’t accomplish anything. Always a trade-off between those two, and we can’t be productive 100% of the time, and we can’t always be resting. The balance between those two changes depending on the environment and how we interact with it.

2020 has been a year we can’t wait to see out. 2021 may not start out much different, but the optimist side says it’ll going to improve. I guess we shall see.

In the meantime, I’ve also been figuring out the differences of being busy and being productive.