January: A Look Back, and No Resolutions

Oh, January.  Oh, my vast trove of memories from Januaries I have lived through.  I’m glad to have survived 62 Januarys over my lifetime, and every one has this distinction because it’s the first month of a new year.

There was a time when I was big on publishing my New Year’s resolutions.  I would think about them hard and then I’d post them as a way of trying to make them stick.

I am sad to see when I read back through years of resolutions, that I’ve only accomplished a few of them. I never learned Spanish, I never read a book every month, but I did completely renovate my living room, built a new back deck and had a marvelous stone walkway installed. So that’s that.

Looking back, I could feel bad, but at least I took time to think of what they were. The column I linked to above questions whether we should even bother, but bother I did, for many years.

Here are my new year’s resolutions for 2014, as I wrote them back then on this blog. Back in 2008, I was excited to have just returned from an epic journey to Iran, and I shared my equal excitement about having my story published in the Valley Advocate about the trip. I was also interviewed and featured in the Greenfield Recorder.

Well, here it is, 2022, and I am not going to share my resolutions on this blog. But I am thinking about them and I have nailed down a few things I want to address….and try to do better with.  I’ll keep them close to my vest and if I don’t succeed I won’t have to read the blog about it.

This January is not as bad as January 2021 when I wrote about how glad we all were to say goodbye to the annus horribilis that was 2020. We bid that year goodbye and indeed, 2021 was much better and I got to travel about ten times on different trips, that I shared on GoNOMAD. Instead of ‘Where We Went in 2021‘ it was just where I went because few others got out and traveled much in 2021.