Last January, Without Resolutions

Last January I did something unusual for me. I made no list.

Nothing on the fridge. Nothing in a notebook. No big announcement to friends over the second glass of wine. I had always been the sort to sit down on the first of the year with a clean page and a head full of plans. That year I sat down and looked out of the window instead.

I'm writing about it now, from September, because enough time has passed to say what happened.

Why I stopped

The old lists had a pattern. By the middle of February, most of them were quietly abandoned. By March I was embarrassed. By summer I had stopped looking at them, and the guilt had settled into a background hum. It wasn't a way to begin a year. It was a way to begin a small, annual disappointment.

So I thought: what if I just don't?

What I did instead

I did very little on purpose. I tried a few things, loosely:

1. I paid attention to what I was already doing, without trying to improve it

2. I wrote down one thing each evening that I'd noticed that day

3. I let myself skip anything that felt like an obligation

4. I looked out of the window a lot

The notebook for that month is thin and strange. January 4th: "A heron stood on the canal for forty minutes." January 11th: "Burnt the toast, ate it anyway." January 19th: "Snow, then not." There's no grand theme. It's mostly weather and toast.

What the month felt like

Quiet, mainly. I had expected to feel a sense of loss, as if I'd skipped the beginning. I felt something closer to relief. Nothing was pulling at me from the future. The month was simply the month, a little cold, a little long, with its own small events.

There were hard days, as there always are. I won't pretend a month without a list makes everything light. But when the days were hard, there was no list to judge them against.

What lasted

By September, something had changed that I hadn't planned. I'd stopped doing a few things I had always done out of habit, and started a couple I hadn't tried. I walk in the mornings now. I read more. I no longer buy a diary in December.

None of it came from a resolution, and that seems important. I think the changes came out of the noticing. I paid enough attention to see what I wanted, and then, slowly, I did a bit of it.

Not an instruction

I know some people love resolutions, and they get a lot out of them. I'm not arguing against that. I'm only saying that for me, the quiet version was better. If lists have let you down, you're allowed to try none.

This coming January, I'll probably do the same. I'll put the kettle on, find the notebook, and write down one thing I noticed. Perhaps a heron. Perhaps just the toast.