Happy New Year! At Poppy Corners, we are having an end-of-year blessing: RAIN. As always, we desperately need it, but unfortunately, as is so common these days, it comes all at once rather than in manageable amounts. Our street is a river, our patio a pond. But the areas where I added another inch of wood chips this past summer are completely fine. That’s the power of organic matter!
Anyway, I figure this rain is an opportunity to spend some quality time indoors. I made cinnamon rolls to have as a special NYE treat; Rin and Tom are making a butterscotch pie for our New Year’s dinner tomorrow. I also tallied up my mileage for the year - my personal goal was to walk/run/hike 1500 miles - and not only did I meet that goal, I exceeded it, with a total of 1,664 miles! That feels like an accomplishment, for sure.
For both Tom and me, our overarching goal for 2022 was to cultivate active hope, as well as an attitude of ‘noticing,’ or in other words, being mindful. I think we did ok on both those goals, but maybe not as well as we’d hoped. Both Tom and I had some unforeseen challenges that threw us off our game a bit. Tom had a big job shift, making a lateral move at the college. At first he was very unsure about this, but it has turned out to be an enormous win in the long run - his stress level and work load are much more manageable now, even allowing him to leave work at a reasonable time each day (something that hasn’t happened for years). As for me, my year ended up being crazy busy, with a new teaching gig, a new farm to develop, and an entire program to get up and running; all of that was exciting and also slightly stressful. I’d say that we scored 8/10 in the active hope department (mostly due to watching our kids crush it in college), and maybe 6/10 in the mindfulness department (mostly due to our long weekend hikes). Not awful, but not great, either.
So we want to continue working on those 2022 goals (as well as our 2021 goal, which was resilience, still very much top-of-mind). But we have also determined a new goal for 2023. I just read an article in the Washington Post titled “Pick a new year’s word instead of a resolution,” and I like that idea (I would never use the word resolution anyway!). So here’s our word: Connection.
Here’s the thinking behind that:
Tom and I have enjoyed our new status as ‘empty nesters.’ It’s fun to only concern ourselves with ourselves. Cooking for just us is really easy and simple, basically just some protein and veg and we’re happy. We’ve gotten into a routine of going to church again, which has been really nice. We can go on long hikes if we want to. We’ve been trying out new date-night destinations, like seeing concerts with musicians we don’t know, at local venues we’ve never frequented. We’ve gotten into a nice routine, learning to live again with only one car (and an electric one at that), taking public transit to work or walking to do our errands. We’ve rented kayaks, visited new-to-us state and regional parks, and found new favorite hikes.
And now that we have gotten to know each other again, as people rather than just as co-parents, we are absolutely convinced that the next step is to find a new community of like-minded folks. When you have young children, you meet all kinds of people in the same phase of life, and your kids’ friends’ parents basically become your own friends, and that’s lovely. But now here we are at a place in our lives when we’re not really meeting anyone new. And someday, not too far in the future, we plan on retiring and moving to a new state. We’ll need some skills to meet people then, for sure. Why not develop those skills now?
Connecting with like-minded folks is a very open-ended goal. First we had to determine what we intended by ‘connecting.’ We don’t have a lot of free time. We both work 40 hour weeks, we both exercise a lot, we have a house and garden to maintain, etc etc etc. Friday night we’re tired from the week, Sunday night we’re nesting before going back to work, weeknights are hard too because of work - yada yada, I’m sure all of you reading this can relate. We’ve been trying to reserve Saturday evenings for church and date night, and weekend mornings for hikes. We don’t want to give any of that up, so how can we fit in connection? It’s a challenge.
Then we had to define what ‘like-minded folks’ meant. We’re outdoorsy people, so doing something outdoors with some kind of club seems promising. A hiking club? Possible, though hikes with a large group of people tend to go slower, and take more time, than we’d like - though maybe a sacrifice is warranted. Could we combine our love for the outdoors with some sort of volunteer act, like trail maintenance? This was a good idea, and also prompted a whole discussion on volunteering in general, something we both used to do a lot, but haven’t lately. Where are our skills most needed? What community needs are we most passionate about? What does our community most need from us? We are not sure of the answers to any of these questions, yet, but we are deep in conversation about them.
The thing is, we are both very aware of the fact that we’ve become insular. I think this is true for a lot of us - we learned how to be that way during the pandemic, and for good reason. Now that we’re as protected as we can possibly be, and ready to emerge and mingle, we find that our social skills are a bit rusty. It feels rather ‘raw’ to be out there in public, and vulnerable. Like we’ve grown tender new skin. We’re a bit protective of that, touchy, unused to interaction.
Tom and I are convinced that this must change.
Our world is changing rapidly, and it’s only together that we can make things better. If there’s anything that I have learned by taking my classes on field trips, to urban organizations whose goal is to make their communities stronger, is that a group of like-minded people, making small changes together, can make things a thousand times better. Working to make things better alone is good and important, but inefficient. We need a group of like-minded folks in order to do big things.
But seeking like-minded folks is true for social situations, too. Tom and I like hanging out with interesting people. We like to learn stuff. We like to hear stories. We like to get to know people who are different than we are. We like to laugh and have a good time. We miss PEOPLE. We have gotten too good at being alone, at not answering the phone, at avoiding email. We want to change that.
So, that’s the goal. Connection. We still have some work to do, to figure out exactly HOW this will work, but we are committed to it, and will begin to work towards that goal tomorrow. First - cinnamon rolls!
Happy New Year, to all of you, my faithful readers (also very much like-minded folks). I appreciate that you stick with me in times of plenty, when blog posts are coming thick and fast, and times of lean, which has been all-too-often lately. I wish you all a very fruitful 2023. I would love to hear about YOUR goals, too.