I’ve never been a big one for new year’s resolutions. Like most people, my efforts falter as January gets underway. I like the idea, though, of choosing a word or two that’ll serve as guides or intentions during the year, and that’s what I’m going with this year.

To make it simple, I’m sticking with three words:

• Writing – this one is pretty self-evident, hence this blog, hence purchasing Scrivener, hence the various little notes I have scattered everywhere about what I want to write about once we’re back on a regular routine and I can actually get some time to do it. Winter break has wrecked havoc on any and all routines, including writing, except for possible this one:
• Journal/journalling: as a child, I kept an apparently copious journal. I’m astounded at how much I managed to write about boys and religious emotion while in junior high, about music and the Phantom of the Opera in early high school, and about Plato, Jung, and Nietzsche by high school’s end. I don’t think I can be very prodigious in these days of kids and distractions, but memory fails, Facebook eludes, Twitter overwhelms, and for the past couple weeks, it’s felt good to put actual pen to actual paper in actual privacy (except for my daughter’s constant questioning of what I write about!).
• The third word answers my daughter’s question, somewhat: spirit. At the UU grad student conference I attended last fall, we all were asked to write down a word of intention that we would bring with us from the conference. I wrote spirit. That word still holds play today, a couple of months later, and it’s one I want to attend to as 2015 goes forward.

Maybe these are big tickets, but they are true, and by writing them here, perhaps I’ll have a greater degree of accountability than had I simply written that I want to keep up the exercise habit that I’d established over the course of 2014 – which is also true!

Therefore be it resolved.