Hello!
And Happy New Year. If you took a break, I hope it was as refreshing and restful as mine was. I did exactly as I had planned to – spent a lot of time outdoors, spent a lot of time indoors, did the rounds of friends and family, and read a stack of books (they were all great - I’ll report back in a future newsletter).
Two days ago, my old friend Andrew came to Sheffield, and we conducted our traditional Year In Review. We’ve been doing this for the best part of a decade now – we’ll set a date to meet in January (last year we ended up doing it in February), and we’ll go for a very long walk together, taking it in turns to run through what we got up to each month. Usually the other person will offer relatively little input: we occasionally chime in to celebrate successes, or commiserate when something annoying or upsetting has happened, but we don’t debate the rights and wrongs of things, or offer alternative interpretations of what the other person has told us.
The exercise is thus somewhere between a good old catch-up with a friend, and a personal reflection. And I find it so valuable that I am constantly recommending that other people add it to their yearly schedule.
I returned to the internet a few days ago, to the usual onslaught of New Year messaging – advice on how to make and keep resolutions, suggestions for small habits that’ll change your life, and larger goals you can work towards that will make you fitter, happier, more productive…
Even when the message was that New Year’s resolutions are a bad idea, and you should learn to love yourself as you are, it still seemed to feed into the belief that this is a time when we should be assessing ourselves, identifying faults and shortcomings, and making a plan to become somehow less wrong (or stay the same amount of wrong), as we move into the next arbitrary period of time.
It’s not that I’m strongly against New Year’s resolutions – I’ve made, kept to and broken them in the past, and probably will again. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, and it’s often what you find yourself wanting to do, at this point in the cycle.
The thing is, I already spend almost all of my time, year-round, thinking about how I can improve and optimise the way I do things. I’m always telling myself I should spend more time writing, train more seriously, keep my desk tidier, do more yoga, clean the bathroom more regularly, read more books and answer emails more quickly. I’m always writing myself to do lists – and I exist in a constant state of mild guilt for not getting through everything I add to them.
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