It’s December 31st, which must mean we’re at the magical interval between Taking Stock and Resolution O’Clock. Though I’m not an especially Christmassy critter, I’m terribly fond of the prospect of annual revision and reinvention. I’d imagined that I might get a bit of a head start, as the folks we imagined we’d spend the Eve with have fallen ill, but it looks like we’ll be a bit social after all, so the rejiggering will have to wait.

I’m not fond, however, of doing year in review exercises, largely because my imagination tends to fix on What Might Have Been. It’s not an especially rueful exercise in the abstract, but it tends to get me thinking about things I might have done differently. For instance, since I often think in terms of the academic year and professional progress, I’ve published six short stories in the AY 2022-23 frame, which is life-affirming in a number of ways–not only because my university views four publications as sufficient for meeting our standards for tenure and promotion. I also have a story on the publication slate for New Myths in Fall 2024, so the wheels are still a-turning. Right now in the social mediasphere, however, I’m seeing quite a few folks tout their award-eligible work, and I’ve not yet mastered that knack. It’s not, to my thinking, a major omission on my part, but one of those matters I might want to rethink in 2024.

As a teacher, I often mull over the famous Socratic dictum on the Corruption of The Youth around this time of year: ”The unexamined life is not worth living.” Self-examination is, I know, a difficult bit of business, especially since the tactics that got us this far will undoubtedly get us at least a little further. It feels to me a little tragic when I see it from the outside–when you see folk so committed to the Truths they’ve dreamed up or borrowed from others that any other prospect seems untenable, if not ridiculous–but it also seems tragic to make change blindly and reactively, without a little due diligence to suss out the advantages that might attend A New Way, whatever that way might be. January tends to be a good month for Trial-Size Truths, with the feelings we get from abiding by those short-term commitments helping us to decide if we’d like to fold those truths into out lives. 

The end of the year is also Garbagetime for Purity Testing, as plenty of folks will try to get us to commit more fully and less mindfully to the Truths they think we ought to share–often indirectly, by criticizing public figures who are not pure enough. Because I poke around the edges of the web to look at the latest news in neuroscience, I get plenty of pop psychology to do with the business-minded Growth Mindset, citing several very rich people as proof of the virtues of that way of thinking. It’s also the time of year when folks will tell us that we need to cultivate a daily writing habit (we don’t), that we need to announce our position on several key issues (we don’t), &c. If we fail to do so vocally and determinedly, the theory goes, then we must be bad people. (I say this having just skimmed past bitter criticisms of Selena Gomez, Neil Gaiman, and Lynda Carter, all of whom have failed in the arena of public opinion, according to a few vitriolic folk, by not weighing in on international matters with sufficient vehemence.) It is, I think, Much Too Much of a Muchness, but it gives us a sense of how folk conceive of themselves in relation to weighty matters.

(Sidelong fact: one of the reasons I prefer to teach ENG 101, centered on expository writing, rather than ENG 201, a course on research and argumentation, is that it’s a great place to practice one of the most essential writing skills–convincing readers why they should care at all about what you think. We’re in a weird place as far as expertise goes, I know, but at bottom I think it’s sort of important to establish how experience has equipped us to weigh in on various matters of cultural import.)

To my thinking, preconstruction involves a bit of self-reflexive scrutiny, the gentle reconsideration of patterns and habits that clearly work but might be worth revisiting. For much of the past year, for instance, given the persistence of the Never-Ending Headache, my daily routine has begun with five pills–Vitamin D, a multivitamin, and a krill oil capsule as basics and a couple of NSAIDs to ease the dull discomfort of my skull. For the past few weeks, however, I’ve been exploring the possibility that my gut health might be linked to my brain pain in some material ways, and I’ve adjusted my startup routine accordingly. Yet today is the first day I’ve dispensed with the NSAIDs, which I suspect on some days I’ve taken merely out of habit rather than need. It’s a little thing, but a foundational one, and probably indicative of a few dozen things I do every day without really thinking about them.

For the same reason I’m thinking about reconstructing my daily docket, which has had the same top twelve items since around Thanksgiving. I’ve churned through 13-27 with some regularity, but the stagnancy of those first few suggests that I’m probably conceiving of them wrongly. My plan this year is to get a bunch of new writing done, and I’ve lined up projects big and small to keep me awfully busy from now until May. I might need to get each project broken down into smaller, more manageable daily chunks to get in the habit of making steady progress, and that will probably entail thinking about them all a little differently. It’s all doable, but figuring out how I’d like to manage the doing is the tricksy bit of business. I’m happy to say it’s already underway–one project, for example, will involve putting together a sixteen-page zine, or about eight total entries, for Kickstarter by March, and I’ve drafted seven already, page by page–but I need to find ways to keep that forward momentum going.

I’m convinced there are big things on the horizon in 2024. I don’t think I need to reinvent the wheel to reach them, but it seems wise and worthwhile to consider how I’m moving toward them.