Dib dib dib - resolution for 2025

or why I plan to be prepared...

It is the last day of the year. I’ve just driven the six hours between my parents’ and my own house, the family lolling about in the car coughing and spluttering at various stages of the annual Christmas holiday illness. I have yet to get the illness. I’m taking industrial quantities of vitamin c, zinc (cheap combo at Boots in Kirkby Lonsdale yesterday) and echinacea drops, in the spirit of prevention being better than the cure for this lurgy.

I have never been a keen giver upper of things for a resolution: it’s a gloomy business giving up. Where’s the positivity in less? I’ll take more every day of the week. More is cheerful. More is better. More is riches. But more of what? I have learned that setting intentions can be a powerful business, especially if one thinks hard about what those intentions are, and one sets them in such a way that there’s a good possibility of success (I love this most extreme example of intention setting: in order to WIN the lottery, one must at least INVEST in a lottery ticket.)

So my advice is to take up something to celebrate the new year.

The year before last I decided that my new year’s resolution was to do less, better. This has become a maxim I will stick to for the rest of my life and I’m not sure if I’ll ever think of another so effective. I do not want writ large upon my gravestone ‘This woman was the busiest ever known.’ Rather, I would like carved in elegant letters, ‘This woman used her time wisely, and achieved much that gave herself and others pleasure.’

For 2024 my resolution was less snappy but still useful: I decided I would do nothing on autopilot, and that I would consider why I did everything before doing it. Obviously one loads the dishwasher in order to achieve clean dishes, but it it’s not always so obvious why one sows seed, for example. So there I slowed down and made choices which had me sowing much less seed, and achieving a better quality harvest. I cut back my dahlia patch because a neighbour grew more and I gave myself a great deal of time which I used to write a book (of which more later.) Even the dishwasher loading got a bit of careful thought: at what time would it be more strategic to load, and unload it? The answer to loading is perhaps unsurprisingly after supper, but unloading got a careful looking at and now happens while the kettle boils and the dog eats her breakfast so that the coffee can steep while said dog gets marched up the field to do her morning poo and I sniff the wind and consider the day ahead. This makes a smoother morning process. Hardly worth the consideration you say? Well, every well ordered five minutes makes more minutes free: therein lies the time to write a book, you see.

So what about 2025?