My New Years' Non-Resolutions

Old desires long dormant are stirring...more doing, less resolving.

I do not make New Years’ resolutions. I have found them to be ineffective in making habits stick. They don’t seem to work well for me, and based on all the gym people I know who actually do go to the gym regularly, they don’t work well for a lot of other people either. An acquaintance of mine made a funny remark right before the new year about “enjoying the peace and quiet at the gym before the influx of newbies whose resolve will last all of two weeks…”

No, I think there’s just something about our human psychology that goes into hyper drive against New Year’s resolutions to make sure that they fail. Some psychologist has probably written about this somewhere.

So, I don’t make them.

Instead, I pay attention to my desires, and then I go do what I want.

This sounds silly, but it’s been quite effective for me.

I usually hear a desire calling and listen to it for quite a long time…a year or more. Sometimes, I’ll think about prerequisites to achieving this desire for much too long. “First, I need to do this. Then I need to do that. Then I need to do this other thing over here. Musn’t go in half-cocked and make a big mess!” And then I say, “Oh, for Heaven’s sake! Just do it.”

This happened last year for two of my deep desires—flower farming and knitting. I love flowers, and I had this itch to try growing some and putting them down at the end of our long driveway as bouquets for sale. I also love sweaters and socks and all things knitted. But I have peculiar tastes and really dislike the long, oversized, and baggy aesthetic topped off with leggings and a messy bun that’s all the rage in sweaters now. I’m much more of a vintage silhouette lover. So, there was nothing for it but to learn how to knit. For both flower farming and knitting, I kept thinking I needed to get my ducks in a row before I started, then realized I was not getting anywhere chasing ducks. So, I just plowed some ground and put in some seeds and I looked up a good baby sweater tutorial online and did it. Lo and behold, I had sold 600 dollars worth of flowers and knitted one baby sweater and three pairs of socks by the end of the year. I am about to plow into my first sweater pattern for myself. I’m nervous.

While all this was happening, other older desires were stirring…all year long. I bet you can guess what’s going to happen next. The thing I will resolve to do, in this case, is just do what I want instead of getting hung up on the plan.

Here are the things I desire most this coming year:

Read More Books

Higher education, and both my nemesis and handy gadget, the iPhone, robbed me of the joy of reading. Before I went to college and way before I ever had an iPhone, I read voraciously. I always had a book in my hand, and I read fiction the most. I was secretly a little embarrassed about that. I reasoned that the really smart, intellectual people had gotten past the fiction stage and were well on their way through the philosophers and theologians and biographies of great people.

What stuff and nonsense! I do enjoy nonfiction, too, these days. In fact, that’s almost exclusively what I read when I do read. What a pity.

Because here’s the thing—the days when I devoured fiction were the most fruitful in fiction writing. Imagine that.

But college attendance put a stop to all that. I had no time for reading good books. I was stuck reading textbooks. After I dropped out of college, I got an iPhone. Though my brain was fully developed at the time according to the experts as I was around twenty-six, the relentless pull of that wretched thing drew me in anyway. I am not nearly as addicted to my phone as the younger generations around me, but I do resent the time it has taken from me. I will need to banish it to a different room when I have a real book with real pages in hand that I want to read.

I look forward to traveling through many adventures and through distant lands in the pages of books this year.

Practicing Piano and Violin Again

I used to be quite the active musician before I got married. I sang, I played violin in an orchestra, I played piano, and I taught all the above in a private music studio of about forty students. But after I got married and moved South, I didn’t become active on the music scene because Jonathon was serving his first time in office as State Representative. He had to travel back and forth to the state capital every week from January until the end of May, as well as run for re-election every other year. It was a grueling schedule. Yes, I could have just stayed put at home and done my own thing while he was doing all that, but as a newlywed who had married later in life and was very much enjoying my non-lonely existence, being separated from my husband that much did not appeal to me in the slightest. So, I dumped the music scene and practicing and everything else. The only thing I did keep up was singing, occasionally singing special music for our church, singing in the church choir, and things like that. Besides the demands of politics, my health declined rapidly after we married, and I’m not sure I would have had the bandwidth to practice even if our schedule had been less hectic.

But Jonathon is no longer in office and my health is much improved. Last year, I began to feel the itch to practice my instruments again and keep my talents from atrophy.

A few months ago, I auditioned for the local community choir and got in. I have also been singing for a choir that does one charity concert a year for the local cancer association. Singing in a group has been a blast and a delightful outlet.

Singing, check.

So, all that remains is to warm up my fingers over my piano and my violin.

When I was still taking violin lessons, I started learning Dvorak’s Romance Op. 11. It’s a beautiful piece and I made strides, but I never really mastered it. I look forward to giving it another go. If you’ve ever watched the TV series, The English, you’ll have heard it. It was used to great effect in that story which, as a side note, had me a blubbering mess by the last episode. I also want to brush up on my Bach unaccompanied Partitas and Sonatas.

For piano, I’m torn. I’m thinking either one of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words or a Greig piece or Debussy. I adore Debussy’s L’isle Joyeuse, but that one scares the dickens out of me. It’s quite difficult, so I’ll probably just settle for an Arabesque.

Listen to Music

Classical music specifically. And I mean, really listen. Set aside everything and give it my entire attention.

I used to do that all the time, too. Back when I was a prolific story writer. Back before the institution of higher blunting and before the stupid iPhone. In fact, the concept for my last novel was dreamed up over a decade ago while lost to the world in Vaughen Williams’ The Lark Ascending.

Reading and classical music fill up my well of creativity. I greatly desire to get lost in both once again.

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If there is one wish that you could fulfill for yourself this year, what would it be? Tell me in the comments.

I may, from time to time, record some videos of my music making and include them in these weekly letters—like I did with that carol at Christmas time. I hope you enjoyed listening to that one as much as I did singing it.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

P.S. If you enjoy reading my weekly essay, please consider upgrading your subscription from free to paid. This will help me work to get my two novels published. Thanks for your consideration! Meet you back here next week.