Things I Want to Do More of in 2021
I want to drink my coffee out of fancy china that I borrowed from my mother. I want to scrape up those bits of beauty and let them simmer at the surface of everyday life.
I’m not sure I’ve ever believed in New Year’s resolutions, and especially this year, I didn’t feel inclined to make any. One of the things 2020 taught me is that it’s foolish to think you know what the future holds. You really have no idea! None whatsoever! Although, sure, I understand the appeal of resolutions. It’s fun to imagine the ways you might change, the things you might accomplish, the opportunities you might seize; the ways in which you might make the most of the coming year. But when I consider what lies ahead of us, and how strange this year is likely to be, I keep coming back to this: I have no idea what the next twelve months will require from me, or from any of us. And life is stressful enough as is, these days, without committing ourselves to rigid notions of How We Ought To Be.
Instead, ten months into this pandemic, I’m asking myself: what has been working? What has granted me sanity, and stability, and happiness? What has kept me going during the moments when it sometimes seemed impossible to keep going? What do I want to keep doing in 2021?
I don’t have any kind of plan for the year ahead, but I do have these touchstones. These small, sometimes frivolous things that have kept me connected to myself. They don’t really look like resolutions; it’s probably better to call this a gratitude list. But such a list feels appropriate, because even though 2020 was a difficult year, a year with so much needless suffering, I am alive, and every day I am flooded with gratitude for that fact, and I am also flooded with gratitude for the small things that comprise that alive-ness.
Like taking long walks in Central Park, with a friend or by myself, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, wearing extra layers if the weather is bad, bribing myself to get outside with an overpriced cappuccino or hot chocolate. Calling friends, whether on FaceTime or Zoom or the regular old phone, sometimes for marathon catch-ups, sometimes for a quick five minute hello on the way to the grocery store. Volunteering with a local community kitchen, and getting to know a different side of myself. Buying small just-because treats, like flowers from the bodega, like really good dark chocolate, like the above-mentioned overpriced cappuccinos. Climbing back on the sourdough bread train, this time finally overcoming the learning curve that means I can understand words like “hydration” and “leaven” and “autolyse.” Baking in general, and foisting the excess upon friends and neighbors. Overcoming an old shyness and engaging in the kind of small talk I used to find difficult, asking a stranger’s name, asking how their day has been, seizing the chance for those brief-but-beautiful human interactions. Reading whatever I feel like reading, feeling absolutely zero obligation to stick with a book that I’m “supposed” to like but don’t actually like, because life is too short. Texting friends about trivial things that are actually vital things, like what they’re cooking for dinner, like the new bit of celebrity gossip (I just learned yesterday that Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis broke up, devastating!!!). Losing myself in the pleasure of writing, remembering that sometimes (often) the writing is hard, but the work doesn’t always have to be Hard in order to be Good. Reminding myself that, even though it’s a while until the next book comes out, this isn’t an arid stretch of time, instead it’s a chance to go deeper into the next next book, and that one of the gifts of writing is that it allows me to spend a great deal of this quarantine immersed in an elaborate daydream.
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I started writing this on the second-to-last day of December, and originally thought I might get it posted before the end of 2020. It would be a nice way to start 2021, I thought, with this codified snapshot. A cute little January 1 dateline. New year, new content! And then it took me longer to get myself together, and I alternated between telling myself to stop procrastinating and being precious (it’s just a blog, after all!) and then feeling that it was somehow entirely appropriate to post these New Year’s thoughts on …. January 5. Because why not? January 1 is only significant because we decide it’s significant. We don’t always begin anew at those perfect, picturesque, calendar-sanctioned moments. Sometimes change happens at a totally random moment on a totally random day. And I think it often happens without us even realizing it; not until plenty of time has passed are we able to look back and say, that was it, right there, that was the day it all started changing.