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Happy 2024!

I brought in the new year with a bout of COVID. I’m on the mend, but it wasn’t the way I’d hoped to see the end of 2023 and the start of 2024. I’d been up to date on my vaccinations, and took precautions while traveling over Christmas, but, alas, they were not enough. It remained mild-ish, aided by paxlovid, and, all-in-all, I cannot complain.

Still, I missed a chance to have a little bubbly, and I just love the bubbly. I did have a delightful cava on Christmas day.

However, now into the new year, I’m hearing all about that institution of betterment known as the New Year’s Resolution. People resolve to be healthier, kinder (to themselves and others), to check some item off their bucket list.

I’ve been good my whole life at setting, tracking, and attaining goals. These have never—not once—been a change of the year resolution. The best explanation I can generate is that most of my goals, plans, and milestones have been organic.

Example: In 2020, reeling from my brother’s death, enrolled in a CSA, and stuck at home, I learned to cook. I had a butternut squash, and what to do with a squash but make it delicious soup. I’d never done so before. But I looked up a recipe online, and tried to follow it faithfully (with modifications for my lack of the right tools and right ingredients). It turned out remarkably well for a first attempt. I got another squash. I played the Kansas Public Radio show Retro Cocktail Hour as I cooked (note: I do not live in Kansas—find it on Mixcloud or at retrococktail.org). I thought about how Nate, my brother, was an excellent cook. When something turned out, I inevitably thought of him. Maybe I was cooking in homage to his memory.

Anyway, the byproduct of this became two goals: to eat more vegetables (I try to eat 12 to 20 different veggies a week) and to learn to cook more. In the intervening months and years I’ve learned to make homemade tomato soup, potato soup, and coq au vin. That’s right! French cuisine, which I l-o-v-e. Another dish called Poullet Vallee D’Auge from Rustic French Cooking Made Easy (note: it is rustic, it is French, but it is not easy, at least not for me the novice cook).

Often, I set fitness goals, but not usually at the beginning of a year. Last year, I challenged myself to walk to work. I live just under two miles from my office, and I thought it would be great to not use as much gasoline, for both environmental and financial reasons, and to be able to get the exercise of walking that distance. Because I live in hilly West Virginia, and because I am a rheumatoid arthritis patient with a prosthetic knee, the desire to walk the distance from my house to my work and back again might have presented more of a challenge than it would for most. And yet, when the whether cooperates and I don’t need my car, you’ll see me walk to work as much as I can. But the challenge started two Springs ago, as I wanted to see the daffodils poke their sunny heads up, followed by the riot of spring flowers and tender buds.

Hot weather proves difficult for me, so last summer, needing an alternative, I purchased a rowing machine, and happily put it to use most weeks when not making the aforementioned walk.

And while I’m a disciplined writer, I never make writing goals on January 1st. I just keep writing.

And yet, this year I’m feeling like I need an extra something as we start 2024.

This, too, may have started last summer, when, asked to teach a book club course for the Honors College at the university where I work, I decided on two books and a poem by Ross Gay focusing on Delight, Joy, and Gratitude. But now, more than any other turning of the calendar, I feel the need for these in my life writ large.

It’s not that I lack them. On any given day I may experience one or up to all three of these emotions. but they don’t feel seeded into my being, my everyday existence. And so, even though I’ve not made some resolution yet that’s an Ode to Joy (Beethoven, forgive my pun!), it’s lurking in the shadows like some shy resolution, afraid of being spoken into a full-blown resolve.

Maybe it’s a fear of failure? I mean, it’s reasonable to consider the personal fallout at failing at delight, joy, and gratitude.

So, let me take a different tack.

While I have no formal training in photography, last year I received a DSLR camera as a birthday present, and this year, a new lens for it. I love just messing around with this camera, trying to catch the essence of what I see. There was an opinion essay last year around this time about taking “ordinary world” pictures, and I glommed on to that idea. Because my ordinary world pictures bring me delight, sometimes even joy, and I’m grateful to have this pricey toy by which to spark it.

So, to usher in 2024, if not a resolution, a few snapshots that inspired one or all those emotions, my particular lens on it.

Odd and Ends:

What I’m listening to: lots of classical music. Winter, classical music, and writing swirl into a magic that makes me full. Hot beverages, too. What I’m reading: Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.