almach | resolutions for 2026 (Reply)

I'm not customarily much of a new year's resolutions person (I tend to agree with the line of thinking that they're mostly just people making overambitious goals and setting themselves up for failure), but I have two this year.

One is to eat without distractions (primarily screens). This primarily means not eating in front of the computer/projector or while scrolling on my phone, but I'm thinking it includes books and podcasts too. Basically anything attention-grabbing that prevents me from being present with my meal and my own thoughts. So far over the first couple days of the year I've enjoyed having the radio on one of the classical stations and just looking out the window. (My kitchen window has a lovely view of trees, which makes this very nice!) This has a couple of purposes/motivations: one is that I think the driver of a lot of distractability/stimulation-seeking is a fundamental discomfort at just sitting with my own thoughts, which horrifies me because I think enjoying or at least being at peace with your own company is one of the cornerstones of a good life (after all, your own self is the one thing that's always with you every moment of your entire life, barring some weird corner cases) and I can tell that my instinctive twitchy attempts to get away from it are the opposite of conducive towards being how I want to be, and the other is that I'd like to shift towards eating more foods that are of a type and quality where it's pleasant to eat them while actually paying attention to what they are and what the experience of eating them is like. This isn't an "absolutely 100% of the time" rule; I'm planning to make exceptions for social eating on video calls with friends and family and for special occasions/traditional snacks while watching certain events, but in general the idea is that exceptions should happen for a reason. Like being a kid again, getting to eat on the couch while watching something on TV should feel like a special treat.

The other is to attend at least one cultural or social event per month. The parameters for this are pretty broad; it could be a live event like a wrestling show or a play or a hockey game, or a purely social event like a knitting meetup or a group bike ride, or something hands-on like an art class, or some other category of thing I haven't even thought of yet. The point is to go live in the world. Museum visits totally count as well, even though they aren't "events" in the sense of being externally organized.

I have some fitness and creative goals as well, but they aren't "NYRs" per se, for the reasons mentioned at the top of this post.