On Goals, Resolutions and Breaks

Since 2014, I've been reading and rereading Andrew Simonet's glorious book Making Your Life As An Artist. It's all about how artists can use the skills they already have in their creative work to make their productive lives more balanced and sustainable. I'm reposting this link to his book HERE - you can buy it or download it for FREE. Do it now. 

The section on planning got me to start creating yearly goals, instead of New Year's Resolutions. After listing lots of potential goals that are personal, creative and professionally aimed, the idea is to choose three of any category to push toward over the long term, step by step, instead of hoping for good things to happen. SImple, but groundbreaking for me.

Here are the ones I landed on for now. Looking at my big list of all-so-tempting goals, I might change my mind, but this feels like a good starting point:

• Make sustainable income (as an artist/writer/teaching artist)
• Finish writing my big screenplay project
• Create and attend to a new daily writing process that will simplify my working life

​After feeling all cozy about making big goals instead of resolutions, the oh-so-inspiring Britt Udesen, Executive Director at The Loft Literary Center, posted this important PSA about taking lunch breaks that got my attention.

Especially because I don't work for one solitary company and I'm not in one office building all day, I can give myself all kinds of excuses on why I don't need to get out of my workspace for for lunch, or even to walk around the block for an hour. Whatever I tell myself, I do need this. When I take a moment away, I notice the difference. I become human again. 

So, along with these goals in process for 2016, I'll take on that resolution, too. Start taking lunch breaks, whatever that means for me that day. I know my work and general state of being will improve for it.

All the time this year I'll be looking at how to make things easier and more joyful each moment as I do my work, live my life and spend time with loved ones. Because if I'm not embracing this world I'm building for myself, why do this? Why live outside the norm as an artist and writer to suffer in a self-punishing existence? No thanks. No longer worth it.