Last year I decided I was going to try to write every day for a full year. I honestly don’t even remember the decision-making process, if there was one. There probably wasn’t. It was probably pretty spur-of-the-moment, like pretty much most of my life. I think I had a lot on my mind, given I had just moved from Forest Lake to Roseville, but I was still coaching in Forest Lake. I was feeling a lot: guilt, excitement, confusion, sadness, loss, fear, and hope. I also had started a daily writing routine for my Composition classes for the first time and I wanted to practice what I preach.

So now we’re headed into the new year and I’m wondering what I want to do, if anything, as a resolution. It has to be measurable and attainable, and I probably have to find a way to make it relatively public because otherwise I may not follow through.

There are the perennial favorites: exercise more, get healthier, look at screens less, read more, eat more veggies, whatever. All of these are perfectly fine resolutions, but they’re pretty wish-washy. There’s also the “I don’t really want to” part of at least some of those. Writing every day was easy to evaluate: either I did it or I didn’t.

I did think about challenging myself to take a walk every day, even if it’s icky out, for at least one block. It would be easy to monitor and would just require me to stick to it. I’ve also thought about phone limits, but I’m not sure how to quantify that as easily.

I never thought I would follow through on last year’s challenge to write every day, but here we are. That gives me a lot more confidence than I’ve ever had before in terms of my ability to stick to something again this year. The question is, simply, what do I want to do?