January Updates - Happy 2025
Let's paint! Let's write! Let's be creative together!
Hello, friends! Happy New Year to you and your families! I hope you found comfort and joy in the holidays and wish you peace and happiness in the year ahead.
In the final week of 2024, I spent some time reflecting on the year, looking through my journal to see the highs and lows, and thinking about what I want for 2025.
One of the best habits I adopted in the past couple of years was setting up a seasonal planner section in my journal. I set mine up very simply. I use two-month increments, as that works best for me. I turn to a two-page spread and divide both pages horizontally into two boxes. On the left, I label the halves with the months for that spread. On the right, I label the top box “Tasks” and the bottom box “Wins.” So, at the front of my bullet journal for the year, across six two-page spreads, I have the whole year at a glance. In the months section, I note any particular events or deadlines. In the tasks section, I write my big-picture to-do items. But the best part is the “Wins.” Any time something good happens during those two months, I write it down. What counts as a win? For me, it’s more about actions I’ve taken than outcomes.
Age brings wisdom—or so they say. Some of my wisdom in recent years has been to focus my goals on actions I can control instead of results I want. For instance, instead of “Get paintings into juried exhibits,” my goal was to submit to six juried exhibits. Each time I submitted, I made a note in my bullet journal in my list of seasonal wins. If a piece was accepted, that was a win, too, but even if it wasn’t, I was still winning just by putting my work out there!
I think of how many times throughout 2024 I heard myself and my friends saying, “This year sucks.” And lots of aspects of it did suck. And yet, when I sat down and reviewed all the wins I recorded in 2024, I saw proof in black and white that it was a remarkable year for me, full of great things that I won’t bore you with here. Suffice it to say that I set some goals for myself and accomplished most of them. No wonder I was so tired by the time December rolled around. I had a lot of wins because I took on so much.
The great thing about recognizing my own actions as wins is that doing so has helped me think about how I want to spend my time. For instance, I listed the following as a win: “Reassessed and revised goals and made a new plan.” Instead of doggedly sticking to my initial idea, I realized that the goal I set for myself, while doable, wasn’t in keeping with how I most wanted to use my time, and so I regrouped.
One other journal habit that served me well in 2024 was setting a daily intention. Each morning, while having my coffee and sorting out my to-do list for the day, I set an intention for that day. Very quickly, themes emerged. Some intentions only appeared a few times, but others came up again and again, pointing me toward how I want to experience my life and spend my days. From those themes, I have chosen three that I am going to keep as my guiding lights for 2025.
My Intentions for 2025
Honor My Body
I’m old enough to realize that I cannot take my body for granted as I did in my younger years. I need to move more, eat right, sleep well, and rest when I’m tired—all that good stuff so my body will keep doing all the things I want it to do for a very, very long time. Too often, I take the attitude that I don’t have time. I don’t have time to work out. I don’t have time to stretch. I don’t have time to rest. But that’s not quite true. The reality is I don’t choose to make time, and I’m trading time in the short term for time in the long term. Time to flip the script on that one. My future self will thank me.
Be the Guardian of My Attention
There’s just so much content out there vying for my attention all the time, and in the world of autoplay—where one video or podcast leads to the next without my having to make any choices—it is so easy to lose hours and days consuming content. Social media, TV (whatever passes for TV these days), podcasts, audiobooks, the 24-hour news cycle... noise, noise, noise. It’s possible to pass whole days without sitting quietly with one’s thoughts. I don’t like feeling scattered and unfocused, but luckily, I know a way to reclaim my brain: Be more choosy about where I direct my attention.
Go Slowly
If you know me at all, you know this one is going to be hard for me. I have a theory that there are two types of people: those who think there’s never enough time and those who always think there’s plenty of time. I’m in the former camp, and that scarcity mindset means I’m often rushing. The result of my rushing? I arrive early, beat all my deadlines, and feel exhausted and stressed. I don’t want to be tired and stressed. Maybe I should just go slowly, even if it means doing less.
“Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.”
~Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 3
How do you want to inhabit 2025? Tell me in the comments! I’d love to know what your guiding lights are.
News & Updates
Work on View
My painting , Red Apple Farm, painted last August on location at Red Apple Farm in Phillipston, MA will be on view the New England Watercolor Society in Plymouth from January 17 to March 5.
Learn watercolor with me this winter!
Starting January 9, I’ll be teaching a weekly Watercolor Fundamentals class through Two Bridges Art Academy. Classes will be held on Thursday nights from 6 to 9 PM. They will take place live via Microsoft Teams, so you can participate from anywhere. If you want to try watercolor and level up your skills, check it out!
Why should you take my class when there are so many free tutorials online?
We’ll work through a carefully planned sequence of lessons designed to help you make quick and measurable progress. Instead of learning bits and pieces randomly from videos, I’ll guide you through a logical progression with exercises to grow your skills along the way.
You’ll be part of a community of learners who are all in a similar place in their watercolor journey.
You’ll get personal feedback, encouragement, and guidance throughout the course.
Our weekly meetings will give you a healthy deadline to ensure you keep practicing.
Each week, you’ll see a real-time demo, unlike most video tutorials that are sped up and create a false sense of pacing.
Want a little sample of what to expect? Check out this short video demo!
Write with me this spring!
If you’d like to work with me on your writing in a supportive environment this spring, check out the Monadnock Pastoral Poetry Retreat, which will be held in Greenfield, New Hampshire, from April 25 to 27. While it’s called a poetry retreat, we also welcome novelists and nonfiction writers! I have been fortunate to work with fiction writers at this retreat for a number of years now, and every year it exceeds my expectations in terms of community, camaraderie, and inspiration.