I'm thinking about 2025.

It's been a roller coaster of a year for me. I've gone through flurries of productivity peppered with doldrums of stagnation. In other words, life be lifing.

Here we are at the other end of the year, and everyone is taking stock of the last 365 days, give or take. It's funny how we seem to hold so much reverence for the ending of one year in the beginning of another, as if the calendar isn't completely arbitrary. Humans sure do like their beginnings and endings. We find comfort and patterns, even if we have to create those patterns ourselves... and then promptly begin to ignore them—such as the case with New Year's resolutions.

I suppose that's what I've been thinking about. The idea and tradition of resolutions. I've been waiting until the New Year to jump on some things, and this morning, I found myself wondering, why? In years past, I've done the thing of a flash fiction story a day, a novel a page a day, and a poem a day. Ohh, yeah... and ,. In some ways, it made sense to use January 1st as an arbitrary start date for projects like that. However, that doesn't apply to what I've been considering doing coming up. I've not been thinking about a single project. Rather, I've been playing around with my daily workflow to help increase my productivity without risking burnout. See, my big trouble with this whole creative career thing is that I get excited about a project, dive into it, and work work work to get it done... and then... I've worked so hard that I burn out, and I only fiddle with things halfheartedly until the next project grabs my interest—and the cycle repeats.

The exception to this has been when I've done the journalist projects. That is, gotten a fancy journal for a specific project and worked on that a page a day over a period of time. I've gotten derailed on a couple of those at times because life happens. However, it wasn't nearly as daunting to pick those projects back up.

Maybe, just to buck the system, instead of starting this on January 1st, I'll start on December 31st. Just to be a contrarian. I'd start today, except I'm still struggling a bit with the stomach thing that was likely food poisoning.

Anyway, that's what I'm musing upon this last Monday of 2025. Why wait for arbitrary patterns called? Get going now. Make your own patterns and put your own wacky sense on this senseless universe.

I'm not the first to come up with this. I've probably considered it all before. Still, it's good to get reminders of simple wisdom until it takes hold. Simple isn't always easy, especially when it tries to get us out of our internal hardwiring. I wonder if I'm used upon all this again next year.