My Different Take on New Year’s Goals

Hi friends! How did we get into February already? For that matter, how did we get into 2025 already?? I haven’t posted since 2023. I know I said I was “back”… but I guess I wasn’t.

One of my New Year’s goals is to post here at least twice a month, to reconnect with my online community and grow this space of the internet as a place where people feel loved and fed. Truth be told, I want to post much more regularly than that, but as we can see, I’m not off to a great start. I sailed right past “quitters Friday” (I just learned that was a thing!) without ever having begun. So I’m telling myself that that doesn’t count as quitting.

But whatever, I’m here now! And that is a good start, no matter how late or off schedule it is. I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about this space and what I want it to be going forward. My tagline has always been “inspiring healthy living when home is across the globe”… and I want to do exactly that. I’ve expanded my idea of what “healthy living” truly is over the last couple of years. And it involves so much more than eating well and exercising. While those things are certainly a part of healthy living, they are only a part. Good nutrition and exercise are only about the body… while truly healthy living encompasses all that we are- mind, body, and spirit. Too much emphasis on one takes away from the others, and limits our ability to have a good balance, and true health, in our lives.

In light of this, my New Year’s goals look much different this year than they have in the past. I was very inspired by my cousin Brooke Fuller’s (definitely check out her blog– she is an amazing writer and even more amazing person) list of things she wants to do (& not do) this year. It’s long and detailed and I absolutely love it. It includes things all over the board and totally encompasses mind, body, and spirit. I decided to follow her lead and make a list along the same lines for myself. It’s been fun and enlightening to make it! There are lots of things on it- some big, some small, some trivial, and some really important. I know I probably won’t do everything on it, not 100% anyway. But having so many items on the list gives me a better shot at doing at least some of them, right? And that will be a success in my book. (Did I mention that evolving away from perfectionistic tendencies is a goal of mine??)

So… want to see it? Here we go, my “New Year’s” goals for 2025… (in February):

• Be more okay with “down time”- I have a lot of it these days and I’ve always felt guilty if I’m not “productive”. Maybe part of it is that I never, ever saw my mother sit down unless she was eating a meal, or lie down unless she was sick. So I’ve decided that I need to lie around much more and set a good example for my own children.
• Spend intentional time just thinking… and praying. I know I’ve stifled my own creativity by filling my mind too much with other people’s thoughts and opinions (hello comments section of any social media!). This leads me to my next goal:
• Spend waaaayyy less time scrolling on social media
• Spend more time actually posting thoughtful content on social media and create the kind of online presence that feels uplifting and nourishing
• Publish 2 blogs per month… (starting in February!)
• Make one of these a recipe post… which helps me hit another goal which is to create new recipes again
• Delete “Threads” permanently and not get sucked back in by the clickbait that’s always there
• Read/study at least one chapter of my Bible every day… but better yet, 3-4, so that I can know & practice more of God’s word at the end of 2025 than I do now
• Read more hard-copy books, because there is no better way to fall asleep at night
• Embrace my current season of life where I spend half my time in Manila and half in Colorado
• Begin the process to self-publish a cookbook
• Help grow the ministries God has called me to
• Crochet something really cool and useful
• Laugh til I cry as often as possible
• Visit with girlfriends!
• Don’t weigh myself (yes, for the whole year… I’ll write more on this later)
• Play more golf with Mark
• Listen more, and better, with the intent to understand, not respond
• Call my Pa so regularly that our chats become a habit for him and he will always remember to answer his phone
• Write the kids more letters.  Since they were babies, I’ve kept little journals for each one, up until about the time they went to college. Just this past Thanksgiving, I shared their journals with them. Oh my goodness, how we laughed and cried! (And laughed til we cried!) I wrote very random and specific things that would have been lost to memory had I not written them down. So my letters to them now are again just the “random musings of Mom” that, were they younger, would have gone in the journals. Now, they get sent to them directly via google docs
• Sit on the floor with Daisy (our bunny) and pet her until she either falls asleep, or gets bored and hops away
• Walk, train, and play with Blue (our dog) more
• Buy less stuff that seems so important at the time, but really isn’t
• Do the Waco 70.3 triathlon with Mark in October
• Do it faster than I did last year… even one minute faster! But preferably 2 minutes faster because then I will break 7 hours
• Run the ½ marathon part of the above triathlon in (please God) less than 2 ½ hours. (Everyone who has run a ½ marathon knows what I mean.)
• Lift weights and do all my little “old lady” exercises to keep me from getting injured from all the training. (Everyone over 50 knows what I mean!)
• Go to bed on time (doing the first things few on this list will help me do this one)
• Be open to possibilities and opportunities that aren’t necessarily in my comfort zone at the moment, but could be

There it is. My list. It has all sorts of things, some that I can check off (one and done) and some that I want to do on an ongoing basis. It’s not the traditional “time-bound, specific” goal setting that we all learn about. But if I do even 50% of these 50% of the time, I think I’ll reach the end of the year having grown in ways that I am supposed to.

And in doing so, I hope to be able to “inspire healthy living” whether home is across the globe, or 2 miles from where you were born. Happy 2025, friends!