Hello friends,
I hope you have all made it through Omicron safely and that the sun is starting to hang around more where you live. In my corner of California there has been enough blue sky to make me think we're actually gonna make it out of this hard winter.
I can usually count on January to bring me a nice long round of depression. The intensity of Christmas leading to a crash, the weather, the low light, it's a pretty classic recipe for seasonal depression and I drink that soup every year. This one was another toughie. But I was raised to wrangle meaning out of hardship so if I squint really hard I guess I can be grateful that seasonal depression makes New Years resolutions not something I'm tempted by anymore. I don't get seduced by the ads and the talk shows and all the diet talk because I don't have the energy to do anything about it even if I wanted to. So...silver linings I guess?
Those of us who do set resolutions have probably abandoned them by now. All our motivation and good intentions just Can. Not. overcome the reality of our bodies and our lives. I set a goal for years and years and years to wake up early. Never worked once. My circadian rhythms were intractable. I've set goals to take up running despite the fact that my body gets injured with the slightest pavement pounding. I've set nutrition goals that bore no resemblance to what I knew how to cook or liked to eat. None of them worked or even lasted longer than a month.
The thing is, there is no virtue to any goals we could set, just on their own. There is nothing sacred about running or journaling or even fruits and veggies. You can get the benefits from any of those things other ways. But when we're taught to set a goal, very rarely do we do it based on where we're starting from. We pick it because we think it's the virtuous way to live and then try to force our reality to meet it. And feel like hot garbage and failures at humaning when we can't live like we think we're supposed to.
There's no one handing out medals for the person who manages to live most closely to the Cosmo Girls Guide for Life. Nobody will ever come to your door and say, "Excuse me? We just wanted to congratulate you on being the person who's getting it all right." The only purpose of any of these habits is to improve your quality of life. And if they don't? They're not worth it for you.
The only habits that really matter are the ones that meet your body's needs, when your body has them. Running might be exactly what you need at one part of your life, and at another put you at risk for injury. If you insist on keeping that running habit when it is hurting you, that's not a virtuous thing. That's a masochistic thing.
Whatever goals you set for yourself should be built around what your body needs and what your life circumstances make possible. Anything else will fail just as surely as a New Years resolution. | 
