Weekly Goals For The New Year

 January is a time for fresh starts and making plans, but that's not how I've been feeling lately.  I've been feeling more like hunkering down than exploring, and more like keeping on than making plans.  

But Derek and I had a rare date a few weeks ago - we went to see Little Women: The Musical with friends, and it was so fun.  On the drive to the play we finally fit in our yearly "What do we have to look forward to this year" talk, and after Derek told me several of his wonderful goals, he asked me what I wanted to do this year.  And I found myself a bit stuck, because of the aforementioned funk I've been in.  

However, after some prompting, he did get me to start thinking about some goals I could set, even just fun ones, and I came up with a little list.  Since then I've thought of several more things I'd like to accomplish, but I'm going to try something different this year and NOT overdo it on my goals.  Instead I've chosen just three weekly goals I'd like to work on as we start 2023, and maybe if these three become rather ingrained, I will move on to adding more later.

1. Write one letter a week.

I've made a goal a couple years in a row now to write more letters, but other goals keep taking priority.  I'd like to change that this year.  I think letter-writing is quite a time-honored thing, and it shouldn't be lost.  Letter-writing is a way to send encouragement to those who may need it, to connect personally even over a distance.  It's meaningful in a way that online interactions aren't, because writing a letter takes more thought and effort.  I've also been reading about different figures in church history this past year, and it strikes me how many of them made an impact through personal letters - some of them containing so much wisdom that they are still read by people today.  And letters are a way to record a moment in history too - that's how we know alot of the details from history, because someone wrote to someone else about it in a letter.  There is a rich tradition there, and there is nothing quite like opening your mailbox and seeing a personal letter, is there?  So I really do want to prioritize letters this year.

2. Work on my family tree one afternoon a week.

Derek's mom has done an amazing amount of research into their family tree - she has her ancestry traced back to the 1000s. She made a generous offer to help us pay for an ancestry.com account so that I can fill in my branch of the family tree, and I want to make working on that a priority this year.  Even if I only get an hour to work on it, I'd like to spend time researching at least one afternoon a week. My struggle has actually been that when I sit down to work on my tree, time seems to go by in a blink.  The challenge will likely be to not get sucked into my research and forget to make dinner!

3. Paint or draw something once a week.

When I was a child, I took painting lessons, and produced several paintings that I still have to this day.  They aren't too bad either, if I do say so myself.  I recently took a couple of them out of storage and hung them up in my house, and seeing them hanging there on the wall stirred in me that urge to try to develop my artistic ability more.  I don't feel a strong ownership of those paintings because I had so much help with them, but I know I'm not untalented in that area, and I could improve with practice.  I won't be doing full oil paintings as I did back then (too much of a mess with kids running around), but I would like to at the least practice drawing something weekly.  I also have a whole online watercolor course that I would like to complete this year.  My goal is going to be to paint or draw once a week, just to make it manageable, but I'm hoping I'll become more comfortable with drawing and painting and end up practicing more than that.  But saying once a week takes the pressure off.  I can definitely manage once a week.

What are your goals for the New Year?