I've stood on one leg every day, twice a day, for the past 363 days
And it's been alright
Resolutions. That’s what everyone seems to be writing about right now. So much so that when I sat down this evening to think of what to say, I wanted to avoid the topic altogether – knowing that your social feeds, newspapers, and new diaries would likely already be filled with the subject – but found I couldn’t think past it to anything else.
I love making resolutions, and I love this specific time of year, when there’s the promise/mirage of it being possible to get set up and ready for the full twelve months ahead. Everything in order, fresh pages, fresh ideas. However, a love of resolutions does not a resolution keeper make. My 2024 list was so long and ambitious that I deleted it from my notes app partway through the year when summertime me looked back and laughed at the annual outing of the overly optimistic me who was present from December 27th–31st.
This year, despite the discarded list, I have managed to keep several important commitments to myself. For example, I’ve completed three full months of weekly swimming lessons (save for one missed week when I was ill), and I write something every day – honing my craft not just through my copywriting work, but creatively through my journal, through my writer’s notebook, through my poetry, and through this Substack space.
I have to say, keeping these things going has been a surprise. In the past, I’ve definitely been a starter of things and much less so a completist of them. What’s been different this year? I put in place some support mechanisms. I did a brilliant group coaching programme with Sophie Carefull Coaching (so good I did it twice!); one of my goals was to set up a Substack and write weekly. Today’s post is my 49th in a row.
With writing resolutions specifically, there is way too much advice out there, which, as I’ve written about before, is often intimidating and prescriptive – taking a ‘one way suits all’ approach when actually finding your writing rhythm is personal and ever-changing. I remember feeling super inspired by hearing John Boyne (of Boy in the Striped Pyjamas fame) saying that he would get up every day at five a.m. to write, before work and including on Christmas Day. I thought ‘huh, that’s what I’ve got to do then’. But pushing a pigeon to keep up with a lark routine is unsustainable and guaranteed to lead to disappointment and self-beratement.
Instead, I’ve had success with writing every day by following my own timetable and energies, with some other supports along the way including, most recently, by rejoining the London Writer’s Salon. Whenever I can, I go along to their Writer’s Hour online daily writing sprints, still before the working day, but at eight a.m., not five. Always I come away feeling proud and happy to have written my words, and heartened to know that so many (usually circa three hundred) people are there doing the same.
I feel fortunate to be able to do, and pay, for these things. The coaching and writing salon sessions are thanks to my freelance practice. The swimming lessons are thanks to part of a legacy gift from my maternal grandmother, with the promise to use it for something that I ‘wouldn’t do otherwise’.
There is one resolution I have achieved that has been free to do. I read this Guardian article titled ‘100 tiny changes to transform your life: from the one-minute rule to pyjama yoga’ and thought ‘sure, I’ll pick one of those and [in the paraphrased words of Kevin in Home Alone] give it whirl’. I chose number forty: to brush my teeth standing on one foot. My paternal grandmother (now heading towards a hundred) said that the most maddening and unexpected shortcoming of old age is losing one’s sense of balance. So, selecting a resolution focused on balance seemed a good choice.
Remarkably, I have indeed stood on one leg while brushing my teeth every day since! Every single day, twice a day, for 363 days. It’s a non-resolution resolution that’s been so successful I’m not sure I’d now be able to brush my teeth without standing flamingo-like. The trick to success with this particular promise was two-pronged. One: I folded it into an existing habit. Two: I didn’t think too much about it. I found it a funny, silly thing to be doing. It was focused on adding something to my life, not taking something away.
Beyond that, it has a super long-term goal: to be more balanced in my nineties (if I am lucky enough to get there). … I do quite often think about the ironic possibility of my eventual cause of death being ‘fatal fall caused by brushing teeth whilst standing on one foot’.) But here’s the other thing about it: it’s kind of annoying! It’s made me realise what simple humans we are. I’m now so conditioned to brushing while balancing that I can’t do it without. A trap of my own making. It’s a resolution that has made me both more in awe at the futures these promises can hold and more aware of the pressure we put on ourselves to keep them.
I’ve come back to this post just now to complete it, meaning to pick up on the placeholder I left myself earlier on, which reads:
[Concluding sentence].
But, I don’t think I have anything to swap out for it. I’m not going to recommend a specific resolution. Certainly not a writerly one. Instead, I’ll hand over to that column I read: theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/01/100-tiny-changes-to-transform-your-life-from-the-one-minute-rule-to-pyjama-yoga to see if there’s something, one thing, that you feel like giving a whirl too.
Oh, and here are a couple of nice quotes from my notebook, to boot:
p.s. This week’s post was written to you from a pub that had ‘run out of all crisps and nuts except for pork scratchings’, but that had a Christmas tree that smelt so gorgeously piney it made up for the lack of snacks.
See you in 2025!
Ooh well done - might try that 👍