I'm hoping for a revolution, but I'll start with some resolutions

Let's do this.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

As we neared the end of 2024, filled with memories and best-of lists (including the one I put together), I was struck by a few things.

First, 2024 brought some of the most dramatic changes of my adult life that I helped actively initiate.

The italicized portion of that sentence is significant because it separates the things we control from the things to which we respond. For instance, 2020 was a year of massive change for all of us, myself included, because of the COVID pandemic. But those changes were largely reactive, not proactive.

This year there was a profound change in my personal life with our family’s decision to sell our Minneapolis home and move to Eagan. My professional life evolved as I embraced the changes at the Minnesota Star Tribune. And my creative life changed when I started this site.

Because of these changes, and because I wrote so much of the process down in various essays here, I have a sense that I will remember 2024 more clearly in retrospect than other years of my life.

Second, judging by what I saw and read as 2024 came to a close, a lot of you will NOT recall 2024 all that fondly.

The reasons ranged from deeply personal to societal to political to profoundly existential, and it created a sort of disinterested swirl of dread heading into 2025.

Yay, another stupid year where things are going to get a little worse.

Third, I bought into some of that energy during the bleakest days of December but then caught myself by surprise once the calendar turned to 2025. Without really thinking much about it, I started writing down goals for the year.

The concept of a resolution can be fraught for multiple reasons, and I generally dislike calling it that because it sounds like you have turned your life into some sort of bureaucratic process at a city council meeting.

Resolutions, too, can seem at odds with accepting who we are. If you generally like a lot of things about your life and yourself, why set about trying to change?

They can also create undue pressure, particularly if they are unrealistic and/or if you strive for perfection.

You come up with the ideas when you have the down time to think about things you might like to change; implementing them during the reality of your actual days can be quite another thing.

Plus, the entire exercise of self-improvement can feel indulgent and privileged. It’s not just a matter of will. It often is a matter of time, energy and even financial resources to achieve new things.

Not to mention doing it at the start of a year seems like an arbitrary cliché. We have just as much agency to alter our lives on March 16, June 14, Oct. 4 or any other day.

And yet there I was, making a list of goals on the first day of 2025 and building some guidelines around them. Some of what I wrote down:

• Walk the dog once a day: Our new house (and our old one, too) has a good sized back yard with a fence. It’s easy to just send our pug, Ollie, out there to burn off his puppy energy and take care of his dog business. But he also loves walks. And I enjoy walking him for the fresh air, neighborhood connection and because I know he loves it so much. Someone in the family probably walked him, on average, every other day in 2024. I’m trying personally for every day this year.

• Tidy up the main level of the house, particularly the kitchen, every night: I am far from a tidy person. My work spaces tend to be cluttered. Former Gophers great and Pro Football Hall of Famer Bobby Bell once looked at my desk at the old Star Tribune headquarters and laughed incredulously at the chaos. But I have come to find that starting without clutter or mess in the first rooms of the house I spend time in every day has a calming effect on me, and I am taking ownership of creating that environment.

• Be in a hurry less often: This one is harder to quantify, but it goes hand in hand with identifying what gives me stress. When I have to hurry, my fuse is shorter. So I’m working to give myself enough time, particularly between tasks or events, to mitigate that stress. There is a big difference between doing something with purpose and doing something unnecessarily fast, and I am striving to learn that more in 2025.

• See live music and live comedy four times each this year: The first is for me, primarily. The second is for my wife and I. But in both cases: More joy, more intention with our free time.

• Start new family traditions, including a family game night: We have family movie night and other traditions, but this one is built around active instead of passive time spent (and an acknowledgment that our youngest, who just turned 5, is old enough to join the fun and in fact kicked our butts in Sorry! twice during winter break).

• Host three parties for friends at our house this year: We have hosted large sleepovers for our kids at the new house. Now that we’re settled in, it’s time to make this a gathering space for our friends (and their kids), too.

• Read one book per month: I’d like this number to be more, but this feels realistic. I read plenty in 2024, but not enough books.

• Grow the community on this Substack and begin a novel: I’ve never set out to achieve a certain subscriber level here, instead focusing more on things I want to do and write about. In year two, that means hosting events like book clubs and writing workshops in addition to continuing to write (and podcast) here. Plus, I have an idea for a novel and I want to see if it can spring to life.

Reflecting on this list after a few days, a couple of things stood out.

The first is that if there is a theme here it is the seeking out of authentic connections — to myself, to those close to me and to the world.

The pandemic, which started five years ago (!), is fading away. But much of its residue remains. COVID made it very easy (and early on necessary) to opt out of a lot of things that are integral parts of our social fabric. Regaining those connections has been slow. Let’s accelerate in 2025.

The second is that I became concerned that my list was too self-centered. There are no grand statements about helping humanity or impacting the world in a greater way.

That’s because the world is already perfect!

OK, of course that’s not true. Our culture and path need a giant shakeup. I sense a hopelessness and general malaise in many people that is crushing. Trying to get our arms around that feeling in order to do something about it is daunting on a large scale.

Where I arrived is here: The idea of striving for changes in one’s own life do not have to be at odds with the idea of striving for larger change.

In fact, they are dependent on each other.

No, walking the dog once a day won’t put a dent in climate change. Tidying up the house has no tangible connection to solving income inequality.

But in our current collective state, we won’t come close to solving larger problems if all we feel like doing or say we have the bandwidth for is burying our heads under the covers.

We can’t help each other if we don’t help ourselves.

I’m hoping for a revolution that starts in 2025. But I’ll begin with some resolutions and see where they take me.