TRANSCRIPT
About 20 years ago or so, I quit writing lists of New Year’s resolutions. I used to make lists. I did it for several years. I did it actually sometimes as a child too. I would write down, in the coming year, these are the things that I resolve to change in my life. I will change these things. I make a vow to myself that these will be things that I will fight or work to change.
And I guess in my society that was considered a normal thing to do. I was supposed to do this, and I was supposed to fight for having the willpower to change these things. And sometimes it did open my eyes to things that I wanted to change and in a way orient me toward change in some way. But also, a lot of times it just didn’t work. I couldn’t change those things. I think I maybe wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be for various reasons, or I wasn’t ready to make the change that I intellectually wanted to change.
And sometimes I felt guilty as the result of that. Sometimes I felt ashamed of myself that I didn’t have the willpower or resolve to make those changes. And what I started finding is that I wasn’t really looking forward to the new year that much because it was like, oh, I have this obligation now to write this list of things that I’m going to do that maybe I won’t even do as well as I want, and I’ll just feel kind of lousy about myself.
And so about 20 years ago, I stopped writing those lists entirely. I replaced my New Year’s custom with something different, something better, and something that I find now that I love. And I would like to share with you. Perhaps you know it already, but I’d like to share what I do, and that is writing a year in review.
I actually just wrote my year in review two days ago. I sat down. I’ve done it now every year for 21 years. I just actually looked and saw the first time I did it. 21 years in a row I’ve done it. I sit down and I write down what happened to me in the past year in detail. It usually takes me a couple of hours, two, three hours even, to write it all down. Write down what I did, where I went, who I interacted with, what happened to me, what went on in my mind, how I changed, mistakes that I made, victories that I had, interesting things that happened.
And I do it in a form almost like free association. Just let it flow, let it flow. And I try to be as detailed as possible to catch the most important things that happened. And I basically do it chronologically. Okay, I go off sometimes on tangents, but I do follow the chronological course of my year. And I find that I really enjoy doing this. There’s something about it that gives me a great feeling of satisfaction.
Yeah, sometimes it’s a little painful. Sometimes it brings up stuff for me. Sometimes afterward, like I know the last two nights I’ve had some kind of wild dreams as the result of wrapping up the loose end of this year and putting it in an arc in a big 20-page document. But what I find is that there’s a deep sense of satisfaction I get from doing this. It’s kind of like at this point, after doing it for two decades, I feel like my year wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t do this.
This for me is an opportunity to reflect on my year, to reflect on myself, on my progress, on my growth, on my motivations, and on my decisions, and on my relationships with people to see where I’ve come from. Also, I like to read past years in review. It’s fascinating. I now have basically a 20-year, 21-year autobiography of a good chunk of my adult life in discreet one-year chapter bursts.
And when I read this, I can really see how I changed. And I can also see the thread of the core of me, the strength of me. My real personality comes through loud and clear. And I also want to say that I find this very helpful for my growth process. Now pretty much I journal every day. At various points in my adult life, I’ve taken off a week or two weeks, a month here and there, but usually not more than a week or two. And mostly I write every day.
So in a way, each day I write a day in review of my past day, analyzing it, analyzing what I did, what happened, analyzing my dreams often, analyzing my conflicts, my strengths, my weaknesses, my victories, my fears, my insecurities, my problems, perhaps whatever happens to be coming up for me, anything important that happens. This is what I write about in my journal.
But there’s a different experience from doing it daily than doing it with a one-year retrospective. Yet what I find is this one-year retrospective in a way highlights and augments and complements the daily days in review that I do. And these days in review, adding up to a big year in review, they do change my life. Just the process of writing all this down, writing down my existence, writing down the world of my internal self and my internal self’s connection with the outside world, this changes me.
All this reflection, self-reflection, analytical, critical self-reflection, bound by a love for myself, the real true self of me, this changes me. And the irony is, and this is I think why I want to bring all this up, the irony is that when I would write my New Year’s resolutions, my vows, my things that I will change about myself, and I often didn’t see them change, the process of reflecting on my past, not forcing myself to try to change my future, but instead reflecting on my past, analyzing it, unpacking it, unfolding it, that the journaling, the self-analysis, the years in review, all this have combined to actually changing my future.
And ironically, often changing and helping me, allowing me to do the very things that I wanted to force myself to do by writing those lists of New Year’s resolutions.
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