I love New Year’s Day. It’s probably my second-favorite holiday, after Thanksgiving. Like Thanksgiving, NYD is centrally about getting together with people you like. Christmas is also about “family and friends,” but for me, its religious overtones detract from its other pleasures, and then there’s the massive weight of gifts – getting and giving, but also the gross, insane commercialism of gifts and all the other crap that goes with Christmas.
Beyond its social aspect, I like that New Year’s Day allows for and even encourages efforts at renewal and change. It’s absurd that we tie these efforts to a particular, purely arbitrary date, of course, but I am a sucker for the way a new year seems like the right moment to do things better.
This year, I really enjoyed reading a wide array of friends’ resolutions for 2016, and they inspired me to work up my own list, which also incorporates the “do a little better” idea that’s cropped up in articles like this one on the NY resolution phenomenon.
So, in no particular order:
Train and race hard. I can’t control my finishing times or places – or even, as I learned in 2015 – whether I finish, but I can control how hard I prepare for races and how hard I work during them. I’m going to work hard at all my training (on the bike and in the gym) and racing this year, aiming to finish every event I enter. (So far, I have eight on the docket: Tuscobia 150 (1/9), Snow Crush (1/16), Arrowhead 135 (1/25), Fatbike Frozen Forty (2/13), Chequamegon 100 (6/11), Maah Daah Hey 100 (8/6), Inspiration 100 (9/10), and Marji Gesick 100 (9/24).)
Finish my fatbike-racing book, Don’t Get Froze. This thing has grown from some blog posts on my 2014 races to a decently-long essay that also covers my 2015 races. Now that my big winter 2016 races are right around the corner, I might as well weave them in, too, right? I hope to finish the book by my birthday in April.
Make more art. The book is part of this resolution, and I am going to again try to write a blog post each day in 2016, but I really need to foster my creativity in other ways. Taking photos is really fun, and I love sharing photos on Instagram and Facebook (and of course seeing others’), but I’d like to get back to doing more drawing. I think a Bison a Day would be a fun project!
Consume more art. Here too, the internet is great (Instagram, many Tumblrs, Vimeo, etc.), but I have a ridiculous backlog of music. I think I can listen to one “new” album a week throughout 2016 without buying anything new!
Be more grateful. I need to do a better job of thanking the people around me for all the ways they make my life better. I also need to record what I’m grateful for, either publicly in this blog or privately in a journal.
Be more politically active. I like reading and posting political stuff, but in 2015, I found a lot of satisfaction in seriously engaging with several issues. With the presidential election looming over 2016, the time is right to expand that engagement with time, effort, and money.