2023 Resolutions and Goals

Okay, so it’s a bit late late to be doing new year resolutions but I tend to publish them a bit late. Also, this past Christmas was difficult as it was the first without my dad (he loved Christmas) and I wanted to wait until I’d dealt with all the emotions it generated before thinking about what I want to accomplish in 2023.

But first, let’s recap 2022. The past few years have sucked, both because of the pandemic (which was awful for everyone) and because of watching my dad decline and eventually pass away from cancer (which was incredibly hard). Both made it difficult to focus on the future which is why I haven’t made any resolutions since 2020 and it’s something I normally do each year. Here’s hoping that 2023 will be better. And in that light, here are my five (5) goals for 2023.

Goal #1 – Health & fitness: focus on stretching

When you have an illness that stress can really affect like rheumatoid arthritis, which I’ve had since I was 16, you learn that relaxation and staying calm can really have a positive impact on your health and happiness. Learning to deal with stress is very important and one of the ways I’ve found that works best is walking. Not only does it my lower stress and put me in a better frame of mind, it also is good for my physical health and fitness. I also love walking. But I’m bad at stretching and I’m getting older. So I’m making it a goal to stretch daily, either by doing yoga or simple stretches after one of my longer walks.

Action – stretch or do yoga daily.

Goal #3 – Health & fitness: focus on walking

This goes with the previous goal but I’m listing it separately as the “action” part is different. I trained in 2019 and again last year for long distance walks. In 2019 for the West Highland Way in Scotland and in 2022 to walk part of the Island Walk in PEI (you can read about both here). While I don’t have another long distance walk planned for 2023, except perhaps a shorter local one, training for one is good for me as I walk longer distances when I have a purpose or reason. And getting outside walking is always a good thing as not only does it give me my daily dose of vitamin D, there’s also the stress release of fresh air, sunshine and walking.

Action – at least two (2) walks each week over 10km

Goal #3 – Write more

Unfortunately, my writing steadily decreased in 2019 due to personal reasons and family illnesses (see above) as I was finding motivation hard to find. Thankfully, I started again in late 2022, both on here and on Rambles and Walks, my new walking/hiking/travel blog. This is something I want to continue as I missed writing, although my interests have changed over the past four (4) years. So my second goal is to write more regularly on both blogs – on Rambles and Walks about walks, hikes and traveling – and here about whatever else strikes my fancy.

Action – write and publish at least one post a week on BOTH sites.

Goal #4 – Continue to reduce my tea collection

I’ve been steadily working on reducing my tea collection for a couple of years after I added them all to a tea app so I could keep track of them and realized I had over 150 different teas. No joke! I’ve drank most of the singles and have reduced the total number of teas to about 100 but I would like to get it ultimately down to 50-70 different teas. And while that still probably seems like a lot of tea, I do drink tea daily and a wide variety of it, although mostly black, white, oolong, and herbal. But I still have too much!

Action – continue the “sip down” I started in 2021. Must finish 10 teas in order to buy one (1) new or replacement tea.

Goal #5 – Declutter my apartment

My final goal, since I always like to do five (5), is to declutter my apartment. It’s a bit of an ongoing goal but it’s become more vital to accomplish as the clutter has gotten a bit out of hand over the last year when I let some things slide in my grief. While I come by the urge to be a bit of a pack rat naturally (both of my parents are/were), I’d like to get rid of some of my clutter. To help, I created a decluttering checklist based on some online templates so that I could cover all of my apartment.

Action – declutter one area each month, according to the checklist.

Final Thoughts

It feels good to think about and plan goals, even simple ones. And yes, I stuck with simple achievable goals this year as it would nice to have a win or two after the last three difficult years. Hence the walking goal…

What are your goals or resolutions for 2023?