Thursday, January 3, 2013

resolutions!

I've posted resolutions each January, with varying degrees of success.

In 2009, I resolved to exercise more regularly, keep up with the daily blogging, go somewhere exotic, keep up with correspondence, and stop wasting so much time on the internet. I pretty much failed on all counts.

In 2010, I trimmed the number of resolutions to three: publish an article, find a new job, and floss daily. I did publish the article, but that was about it.

Chastened, I resolved to stop making resolutions in 2011. Incidentally, I was neither happier, nor healthier, and my posting frequency nosedived.

But by the end of 2011, my sweetie and I had come to a decision point. We didn't want to spend our lives killing ourselves for our jobs and trying to fit the rest of our lives around the margins. We'd rather be happy than financially comfortable. So we started planning to to leave our steady career progression, dump our standard of living, and move to where we wanted to live. Our epic vacation in 2011 (the Alps, by the way) had convinced us to put our plans for additional adventures first, rather than trying to fit them around our work lives.

Now that we're fundamentally happy where we are, a lot of the other resolutions I kept breaking have fallen into place. Because I'm not utterly exhausted when I get home from work, I have the energy to work out regularly, I'm cooking rather than eating out, and I have more time available for blogging.

So once again, I'm not really posting any new resolutions. I'm going to continue to focus on the big picture, and hopefully those little habits will continue to improve.

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