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I spent the end of the year squirreling away on a couple freelance projects and dreaming of what I could do in the new year.
The torrent of year-in-review lists that caught my eye in the twilight of 2022 gave me music to dream about exploring with the limited spare time I seem to find myself these days; sometimes my mind wandered to the possibility of spending entire days devouring nothing but Milwaukee rap or devoting energy to making an entire zine mapping out all the bedroom screamo acts whose home-recorded albums populated a few different Bandcamp tags in the past year.
Which also made me think a lot about my New Year’s resolutions. I’m not a hard-and-fast resolution follower. On occasion I’ve written down aspirations for a year on a sheet of paper too crammed with ideas for any one person to pull off in the course of 12 months—but if I could check off a few things, that felt pretty good. I like having the incentive to come up with some goals for the near future, and I like the energy that comes from chasing after them (and I appreciate how that energy can carry me through the bleakest periods of winter).
So, yes, I suppose I have some New Year’s resolutions, most of which I see as guidelines, with two exceptions. I’d like to train for a half-marathon. I haven’t run more than four miles since the pandemic started, and I’d made pretty good progress as a runner before then. In the fall of 2019, I managed to run from the Freeze in Logan Square to the Original Rainbow Cone in Beverly with a group of friends dedicated to running to different ice cream spots in town. I liked having an ambitious, noncompetitive goal to get me to run more than I feasibly thought I could. I’ve missed having that thing to inspire me to push myself whenever I’ve gone for runs since. I’m less interested in the competitive nature of a half-marathon than I am in the possibility of being able to complete one.
I’d also like to complete a book proposal. I’ve had several ideas floating around in my head for books I could pursue, but they’ve remained there for months, if not years. I’d like to get at least one of those stubborn thoughts out of my head and shape it into something that could actually fit between two covers.
The one variable uniting these resolutions (and smaller, unspoken projects or adventures that I’d like to pursue) is time, or rather my desire to be more considerate with how I spend it. Too often I’ll find myself frustrated with how I’m using my free time. I notice I get particularly anxious about whether or not my time is well spent when I’m looking for something to watch on a streaming service; I get both overwhelmed by the illusion of endless choices and the considerable lack of options I deeply want to engage with at that moment that I end up taking way more time to make a selection than I’d like (thus further frustrating me). I suppose part of the answer may be to change what I spend my free time on, but also perhaps to be kinder to myself in what I want to do during the moments when I have no seemingly dire responsibility demanding my attention. Maybe that’s one way to make sure my time is well spent. I suppose I’ll spend the rest of the year trying to figure this out too.
Sincerely,
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