It’s January, which means we’re still in the throes of people announcing and performing their resolutions. In a few weeks many of those resolutions will likely slip into guilty obscurity. By March people will mercifully stop asking you about that resolution. And by June you’ll be blissfully free of any memory of the resolution in the first place.
But in the past few years I’ve noticed my friends doing a thing with their resolutions. One friend started a newsletter to track her progress. Another made a website. Another created a Tumblr. A fourth made a Twitter account to keep tabs on her status. They turned their resolutions into projects. Projects with accountability and brands and logos.
It’s great that you want to read a book a week, or only read books written by women, or run a marathon. I hope you succeed, and grow, and learn something from it. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t actually have to turn every thing you might want to try into a public project. You don’t need a newsletter to keep your fans up on which book written by women of color you’re reading. You don’t need a website or a hashtag. You can just do the thing.
And I’m here to encourage you to do the thing, privately.
This week, vacations from the ordinary from LWON writers.
Perhaps 500 yards from my door—up an icy, winding driveway, a short way down a gravel road, beyond barbed wire fences and snow-skirffed pastures and the wind-twisted trunks of piñon and juniper trees—is a barn that shelters two sailboats in the middle of the Colorado desert. I first spotted them on a walk and stopped to stare. The nearest large reservoir is more than two hours away from the house I am borrowing here; the ocean, more than 16 hours away.
