2017 New Years Resolutions!

I've already figured out a bunch of resolutions for this year and I'm pretty excited about them. I've broken them down by category (in alphabetical order)...

Diet
I met all of my dietary goals last year and now they're a way of life so I'll be continuing them. This year's food-related project is not about changing what I eat but tracking what I eat for a very interesting purpose.

I read this neat article written by a survivalist about stocking up enough of an emergency food supply to last you for a year. His list is based on someone needing 2,200 calories a day (803,000 calories a year) and contains grains, beans, shortening, powdered milk, sugar, honey, potato flakes, salt, multivitamins, and herbs/spices. I'd probably be cranky about the lack of variety if I had to live off his survival foods, but in a pinch it seems like it'd work.

Picture of a garden with text saying "How much should you plant in your garden to provide a year's worth of food?"

At any rate, that list got me thinking about how much food a person eats in a year. I have a goal of eventually growing the bulk of my own food. To do that I'll first have to know which foods I eat in a year and how much of them I eat so that I know what to plant in my garden. So this year my food goal is to track all of my food intake. To make it easier on myself, I'm going to record all the food I buy as the last step of each grocery shopping trip. Then at the end of the year I'll subtract out any foods I haven't eaten to get to my final total. Neat, huh?

Exercise
My exercise goals for this year are a continuation of last years goals. I want to be able to do a handstand, a cartwheel, a split, 25 pull ups, 50 pushups, 200 situps, and 200 squats. I'm considering whether I want to do a 5K color run this spring. And I also want to check out Esh Circus Arts, Rock Climbing, Kickboxing, and Krav Maga - but one at a time, because they're expensive.

Rocky (from the movie) looking triumphant aka my exercise inspiration.

Finances
I'm going to keep up Tea's and my "I am a money magnet!" motto. I will to continue to pay off my debt. I will debit 10% of my income every two weeks to my Roth IRA at Vanguard. I'll build my rainy day fund with 5% per paycheck until I have $10,000 in the account and will finally automate this and then do the CD laddering I talked about. I'll keep using Digit, since it's been working well for me. And I'll go back to doing my $20/week charity donations.

Photograph of $1 bills with scrabble tiles that spell "MONEY" on top of them.

Focus More on Spirituality
I want to re-focus on my spirituality this year. Especially since I have an adorable goddaughter to guide! This resolution has four parts to it:

The first part is to restart my daily gratitudes. My friend Feather and I used to text each other daily with three things that we were grateful for and it really helped us both to change our focus towards recognizing how blessed we both are and being thankful for that. I'm getting back into that habit this year.

Man praying.

The second part is to pray more frequently. I'm going to go back to saying grace before meals and praying before bed every day. I find that daily prayer really helps me let go of the petty stuff and realign my focus on what matters. I'm also going to start saying David's prayer in the mornings when I get up. Someone in a comment thread online was talking about it and it seemed like a great idea to me. Here's the prayer:

"Create in me a clean heart, O God;
restore within me a sense of being brand new.
Do not throw me far away from Your presence,
and do not remove Your Holy Spirit from me."
- Psalm 51:10:11

The third part is to go to church regularly. I was doing this for a while but it fell off when I moved to my current living space because of the commute. I did look around a bit for a church to attend here but I didn't find one that felt like the perfect fit. This year I'm just going to go anyway. No community is perfect, and I can't let my own perfectionism be a reason to never go to church.

Photograph of a cross in front of a sunset.

The fourth and most important part of this resolution is to stick more closely to my spiritual motto. My spiritual motto for years now has been "Become Love." I made it my motto after attending a church service years ago where the priest called us to become love like Jesus is love. Something in that homily really struck a cord with me and ever since then I've carried a piece of paper with my motto on it inside my wallet to help me remember the service and my commitment to be more Christ-like in my daily life. This year I want to do more to put it into action. Both in more concrete ways - like with charity donations, activism, and volunteer actions - and in more abstract ways like the way I treat others and how I think about myself and other people.

Image of two women in fancy dresses and big hats talking with the text
"Before you speak, ask yourself is it True, Kind, Necessary?" superimposed on it.

To give an example: I'm someone who processes things best with someone else to bounce ideas off. The downside of this is that when I'm having problems with another person and I try to process that with a friend, I feel that I often stray more towards negativity than productive conversation. So I want to take more care in how I speak about others by keeping in mind the Arabian proverb: "The words of the tongue should have three gatekeepers: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?" Things like this should go a long way towards helping me become the kind of man I want to be.

This Year's To-Do List
These are smaller things that aren't big enough to be proper resolutions so they're going in a to-do list instead. Here we go:

* Make a will.
* Self-publish my kids' book.
* Take my grandmother out to lunch.
* Make a junk statue with Tea.
* Get a professional massage.
* Go on a date.
* Organize all of my photos.
* Go camping and roast s'mores.
* Swim in the ocean.
* Go sailing.
* Take my dad kayaking.
* Become an ambassador for the Boston Children's Museum.
* Play a violin duet with Primo.
* Make video recordings of me reading kids'  books and send them to Wolfie.
* Bike around Martha's Vineyard.
* Take the kid housemates sledding.
* Go apple picking and then make a pie.
* Go dancing.
* Go on a whale watch.
* Fly a kite.

I may add to this category as I go along, but for now that's it. Yay for New Years!