For the last couple years, I’ve created a yearly theme instead of New Years resolutions (which rarely work out). Last year I declared it my Year of Lagom – a Swedish word meaning “just enough.” This year I’ve declared this the Year of Work.
The French poet Nicolas Boileau in his L’Art poétique (1674) put it this way in his advice to writers:
Hâtez-vous lentement, et sans perdre courage,
Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage,
Polissez-le sans cesse, et le repolissez,
Ajoutez quelquefois, et souvent effacez.Slowly make haste, and without losing courage;
Twenty times redo your work;
Polish and re-polish endlessly,
And sometimes add, but often take away.
Slowly make haste (Hâtez-vous lentement) seems like a good aim for my year—a year of urgency and diligence. It’s a year filled with projects that are coming to an end (projects around RRCHNM, my book) and new ones arising (new tech stack and languages, new digital projects, a new book project perhaps). Wrapped up in this are efforts to remove those things that don’t help me achieve what I’d like to be doing—more thinking, building, creating, writing.
So, work breaks down into a few areas, since more focus on my time means cutting things that could otherwise occupy it. I’ll be…
- …working on having more days with an empty calendar.
- …working on curtailing work travel, boosting personal travel. I traveled a lot last year for work, and I plan to cut that quite a bit in 2023.
- …working on my writing: finishing my book and writing generally. Part of that means more activity here on the blog and the newsletter, but I also want to get words out in more places (a stretch goal would be some place like Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, or Emergence). I also want to work on my writing style and voice more generally. I’m deeply considering an application to the environmental writing studio at Brown University. To work with Bathsheba and Kerri would be wonderful.
- …working on the web. I’m pretty new to Django, which is now part of a new tech stack we’ve adopted at RRCHNM. I never thought I’d be a Python person, but I’m now a Python person. I’ll continue building for the IndieWeb.
- …working on building fitness into my life. I haven’t fully gotten back on track with eating and exercise after the holidays, but it’s a priority this year.
The nice thing about themes is they’re built to not fail: not too specific, but achievable even if by a small amount. The theme, after all, is a guiderail for helping make decisions. Your yearly theme might be a bit of mixed bag, which will then influence how you think about next year’s theme. Not resolutions, but a sort of rule of life for your year.
