For 2021.
Every year around New Year’s Eve, the fam and I take out note cards and write down at least 5 things we’re grateful for or loved about the year we are ending and we flip it over and write down at least 5 things we’re dreaming for/planning for the upcoming year. We put them in an envelope and then read them the following New Year’s Eve - we’ve said all these cards for the 6 years we’ve been doing it.
I won’t share with you all 5 of mine but here’s 1 of them - they are starting to get longer than the 1 word stuff we used to do.
Less meat, more veggies.
Less news, more science.
Less twitter, more books.
Less drama, more curiosity.
Less outbursts, more calm.
We’ve been shooting for less meat for a while as a family but COVID really set us back a bit. We’re back to trying to get to 5 days a week no meat. I know there are some Keto people out there but this is primarily for environmental reasons - raising cows, quite frankly, is destroying the planet.
All 5 of us got COVID over Christmas break (fun times) and I decided for my own anxiety that I really needed to stop with all news while I had it - to try and stay calm. It was amazing what it did for me. So much that I’ve decided to really slow down my news consumption and instead read Science magazines and nature magazine on Apple news - it’s way more uplifting than Trump and McConnell and COVID - which I still somehow find out enough about.
Less Twitter. Twitter was becoming pretty addicting with the election, etc… and it’s another stress raiser for me. I trimmed down my follows - mostly science and nature and discovery - and prefer to look at a book when I feel the need for information - currently reading a Genghis Kahn book - wow.
Ted Lasso quoted (a falsely attributed) quote of Walt Whitman that said “Instead of judgment, choose curiosity.” Loved the line and slightly changed it for me - instead of drama about what is happening or what is not, I’m trying to choose to be curious and ask questions, stay receptive to wonder.
My wife calls them outbursts - imagine me in a car when someone cuts me off - and then take that to all kinds of things in life - like a lightbulb being out. When I was really making attempts to stay calm, I noticed how much stress and pressure those outbursts put on me, so I’m choosing more calm this year - which means I’m choosing more mediation - to better enable that calm.
There ya go. Here’s to 2021.