Here we are at Day 10 of 2026 and I think this is a perfect time for a celebration!
I know, I know, you are probably thinking that you haven’t done much so far, or maybe that you haven’t started, or maybe you haven’t even made a plan yet.
Good news:
THAT ALL COUNTS!
No matter where you are in the process of moving towards the life you want to be living, it’s time to celebrate the fact that you have figured some stuff out!
If you have made 10 days of steady progress – that’s great! You have figured out a system that works for you right now. Go you!
If you have some vague ideas but you haven’t actually gotten started – that’s great! You have figured out that you need a bit more time to get things going. Go you!
If you have tried a few things but they haven’t worked OR if you have a plan but you have only been able to follow it here and there – that’s great! You have either figured out some things that don’t work or you have figured out part of your plan. Go you!
If you don’t have a plan and you don’t even want to think about it – that’s great! You have figured out that now is not the right time for you to make plans. Go you!
If you have decided that you are perfectly happy with your systems and you don’t want to change anything – that’s great! You have figured out that you are pretty content and you aren’t going to be pressured into feeling otherwise. Go you!
When it comes to your plans, your ideas, your practices, and your day-to-day life, please don’t wait for HUGE things to celebrate.
Instead, please choose to celebrate every time you figure something out, every time you make a decision that gives you peace of mind, every time you put in some effort -big or small- that will help you move towards the live you want.
You can always choose a small celebration – a gold star, a relaxing cup of hot chocolate, an extra episode of a favourite show, some time with a good friend- for the small stuff and then scale upwards for your bigger milestones.
The most important thing is that you notice the effort you are putting on a regular basis so you don’t take your work for granted.
Your efforts matter and so do you.
Please celebrate accordingly.
Today, I am celebrating your efforts with this collection of 10 gold stars and 29 gold circles (one of them is kind of off the edge of the page in the photo – oops!)
I am so proud of you!
Keep being kind to yourself out there!
And, of course…
GO TEAM US!
Today’s topic seemed like it needed a lot of gold stars to celebrate it so here’s 10 of them. Image description: 10 gold stars of various sizes interspersed with gold polkadots. Both the dots and the stars are outlined in black as is the edge of the drawing. There are thin black lines in the background behind all the stars and dots.
During each series of Go Team posts, I have a few days when I don’t really feel like writing.
Either I feel meh about the task or meh about my topic and it just feels like it will take forever and not be very interesting to the writer or the reader.*
In case you haven’t pieced it together, today is one of those days.
But because I’ve had these days before I know what to do.
I let my writing routine carry me.
I draw my star – which is always fun for me.
Then I give the post a title and add the categories and the tags
And then I start writing stuff.
Now, I say “stuff” instead of “start writing the post” because the first 10 sentences are just going to be stuff.
The whole point of those first 10 sentences or so is to help me get started, to get me into writing mode.
Occasionally, there’s something salvageable in there, but mostly I just delete them after I figure out what I want to say.
I have learned, with practice, that I can trust my routine for writing these posts. And, in fact, I use a similar routine for any writing that I find challenging to start.
So what does this have to do with your fitness or well-being routines?
If you feel meh about your practice on any given day, you can go through the motions, you can trust your routine, and those actions will carry you through.
Now to be clear I’m not talking about when you have a more complicated obstacle between you and your practice. So this doesn’t apply if you are sick, injured, having a lot of trouble, or having a recurring issue with your planned routine. Those challenges require different solutions and a lot of self kindness.
My suggestion today is for when you just feel meh about your activities.
So if you feel meh about meditating, maybe you drag out a cushion and a blanket and put on some restful music and see if it becomes a little easier to meditate.
If you feel meh about your exercise routine, maybe you can put on your gear and just start moving slowly with no specific plan.
If you feel meh about yoga, maybe you can lie on your mat for a while.
If you feel meh about journaling, maybe you could take out your notebook and pen and put them on the table.
Now, maybe it will turn out that you still can’t get yourself to do the thing. That might tell you that you need to look at your systems, that you need more rest or maybe that your plan for today was a little too ambitious.
I’ll bet, though, that if you let your routine carry you then most of the time you’ll just go ahead and do the thing anyway. Some days, you just need a longer on-ramp.
You will notice that the routines I’ve described here are not elaborate. They are just the few steps that come before you do the thing.
If you like routines, you may also want to spend some time figuring out more elaborate ones for future practices (as long as that will help you instead of making you feel like you have to do a bunch of things before you start your practice.)
But it’s also OK to keep things really simple and just have a few necessary, preliminary tasks that will lead you into your practice.
So, Team, my routine has carried me almost to the end of this post, and I hope your routines will work just as well for you today or whenever the next meh feeling pops up.
You don’t have to be totally enthusiastic and all-in every single time you go to do your practice.
It’s OK to keep strolling towards it until it feels possible to do.
And here’s our gold star to celebrate our efforts today.
Whether you are approaching your practices with enthusiasm or utter meh-ness, whether you are working on a small or large scale, and no matter what your tasks are, your efforts matter.
And so do you.
Be kind to yourself out there!.
💚
Go Team Us!
* If this seems familiar, well I have definitely written about this in previous years. Maybe I’ve even written about it every year. And I feel a bit self-conscious about that, like I’m being too repetitive, but, as always, then I tell myself that if I need the reminder, maybe you do too..
Note: I know that I have definitely written about this before but since I need to keep reminding myself, I’m assuming you may need the reminder too.
Those small ways may include things that will make the task more straightforward, things that will make your body or brain be more comfortable with the task, or things that feel like good rewards for the effort of switching from whatever you are doing at starting the task.
For example, as I’m experimenting with journalling more often, I have decided to keep a notebook on the main floor of my house and up in my room, both of which count as my journal.
Sure, the idea of having one big journal with everything in it is great but I also know myself. If I just have one notebook, there will be times when the fact that my journal is upstairs or downstairs will be enough friction to prevent me from journalling in that moment.
And maybe it’s a bit silly to have two notebooks on the go, particularly when it’s only one flight of stairs between them. But by giving myself the freedom to have two notebooks for journaling, I’ve doubled my chances of actually journalling. Now, any time it occurs to me to write, I’ll have a notebook nearby.
But perhaps journalling isn’t your thing for this year, maybe you are exercising or doing yoga or meditating, instead.
No matter what you are trying to add to your life, it’s worth thinking about the friction that you experience in the process.
What will make your practice more straightforward, more comfortable, more accessible, or more you- friendly?
For example, if you have a nice cushion for meditating in your living room but you find yourself reluctant to meditate because you find it chilly sitting there for a long period of time. Can you put a comfortable blanket or a fluffy sweater next to your meditation cushion?
If you are trying to drink more water, can you fill up multiple glasses of water at the beginning of the day and keep them in the fridge or have several water bottles at different spots in the house?
If you find it unpleasant being barefoot for yoga, do you have a pair of shoes that let you move enough to do the asanas? You can always develop a habit for barefoot yoga over time.
Sure, yoga with shoes on is not quite the same and it’s not perfect, but it’s getting where you want to go.
Do you need to find a specific spot for your exercise clothes?
Do you need to move your weights to a different room?
Do you need a specific playlist to get yourself going in the morning?
It is totally OK to give yourself the things you need to establish and continue your practice even if those things feel a bit foolish or if you feel like you are being a bit ‘lazy’ about it. (Ugh. See my note** about the word lazy below.)
So, if you need to buy a package of gold star stickers to put one on the calendar every time you exercise, then buy a package of gold star stickers and start getting them on that calendar.
If you need to have three towels nearby so you can keep sweat at a manageable level, keep three towels nearby.
If you need to wear a woolen hat to feel comfy while you meditate, wear a hat.
If you want to put bells on your shoelaces so you jingle while you walk, then break out the bells.
Basically, anything you can afford*** to do to encourage yourself, to reduce friction, or to smooth the path is totally worth doing.
Making change is hard enough without imposing extra limits on ourselves.
If something will help you get where you want to go and it doesn’t hurt anyone else then there’s no reason not to do it.
And if people get all judgey about it, that’s their problem.
So Team, whether you are shaping your environment to make your well-being practices more straightforward, or you have everything worked out and you’re forging ahead, or you’re still making your way through your day in baby steps, I celebrate those efforts.
No matter how big, how small, or how intense they are, your efforts matter and so do you.
Go Team Us!
Here’s your gold star for the day. Please be kind to yourself out there.
Today’s gold star is growing like a flower. Image description: a drawing of a metallic gold star on a stem that is growing out of the ground and that has a leaf on each side of it. The star is outlined in black and the stem and leaves are filled in with tiny circles outlined in black. The ground is represented by a wavy black line that is about 1/5 of the way up the page and that bottom fifth of the page is decorated with short black lines that alternate horizontally and vertically to form a woven effect.
*The way I am using ‘smooth the path’ here is not exactly the way the Heath brothers use it in their book but the basic principles are close enough. I think so, at least!
**I think the word lazy is as much of a jerk as the word should. People wield those words like weapons and there is absolutely no call for it. Increasing your chances for success by smoothing the path to your practice is just a smart way to proceed. People can keep their petty judgements to themselves while you forge ahead to the life you want.
***I don’t just mean financially. You also have to decide how much time and energy you can spend on reducing friction and smoothing the path. And if your exact solution is out of range, perhaps there is a different approach that will create the same effect.
While I have long been an advocate of starting small when in comes to new things, I often find it tricky to implement.
I mean, I understand the importance of having a low bar for success.
Intellectually, I know that I am placeholding the new habit while it grows.
In practice, though, I have had a lot of trouble with it.
I thought that it was because, left unsupervised, my brain defaulted to labelling the small task was ‘too small to count’ and hence not worth remembering.*
BUT!
I think that might only be part of the problem.
I think I might have been misjudging the size of the fitness tasks I have been taking on.
You see, I am pretty good at judging a small writing task or a small creative task to do on a regular basis and I suspect I was using similar criteria for choosing fitness tasks.
I mean, that doesn’t sound like a terrible approach but I didn’t look at the big picture. I was forgetting that I have a harder time starting a fitness task, that fitness tasks feel more like ‘interruptions’, that they are different from the rest of my day-to-day so I require more energy to switch from other tasks and start moving, and, speaking of energy, the energy cost to actually do them is going to be higher than the energy cost for writing or drawing tasks.
And that doesn’t include the fact that when I misjudge a “small” fitness task, I could end up needing more time to recover and not necessarily be able to keep to the plan I had hoped to follow.
Now, I’m not saying that all of that came to bear on every single small fitness task I have chosen in the past but all of those factors made regular occurrences. They happened often enough that my brain was getting more and more wary of ‘small’ tasks.
I started to figure all of this out in November when I tried a strength training program that I really liked. I wanted to be able to check ‘tried program’ off of my list so I told myself that I could reduce any one exercise to just a single rep and it would count.
I did all the first set of reps for my upper body exercises and all of the first set of reps for most of the lower body ones but then I came to lunges. I HATE lunges. I know they are important and helpful and whatnot but I still hate them. I was supposed to do a set of 12 but I did a set of 3. And I did the same for my second set.
It was suddenly quite clear that I could keep that part of the workout small until I was ready to expand it. I wouldn’t have to dread the whole workout because of that one part. I wasn’t going to require extra recovery time because that part of the workout was so hard for me. I could do what was right for me and not have to feel like I was doing the workout incorrectly.
(Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds. There is such a difference between knowing something and KNOWING something, isn’t there? Brains are so weird!)
And since then, it has become clear to me that lots of my fitness-related “small” tasks weren’t actually all that small. In fact, they were way too big – either in duration, scope, energy-requirements, or in the mental space they were taking up – no matter what size they seemed on paper.
So, Team, today I would like to invite you to use my realization to save yourself some time and energy.
Please minimize your stress, downsize your frustration, and make it easier to move towards the life you want by making your tasks VERY small.
No. Smaller than that.
Smaller.
Ok, about that size.
In fact, when you are starting out, when you are just creating room in your life for the possibility of doing this thing, go for something incredibly small.
Something that would be ridiculously easy for you to include on your most difficult day.
You won’t stay at this stage forever but it is a great place to start.
And here is today’s gold star for your efforts.
Whether you are already working on your goals, refining your plans, just trying to get your mind around them, or you are figuring out how to make your small step even smaller, your efforts matter and I celebrate you and your hard work.
Go Team us!
PS – I have been following Ruthanne Reid‘s excellent advice on writing for a while now and while I give my coaching clients similar advice, I really love the way she phrases things and I admire the fact that she has been showing up daily for AGES with encouragement and reassurance. In fact, I wish I could team up with her to do more cool encouragement-related things. 🙂 In the link above she is talking about creating a ‘low bar’ for daily habits – you may want to check it out.
A drawing of a metallic gold star that I filled with irregularly-sized rectangle shapes trimmed in black so it looks a bit like the star is made of gold bricks that are on a diagonal rising from left to right. The star is trimmed in black as well. The background of the drawing has small gold circles trimmed in black plus tiny black dots. The drawing is framed with black lines and black-trimmed gold circles in each corner. I have slightly smeared the black paint on two corners of the star because I was impatient and didn’t wait for it to dry.
*It’s only when I investigate why I couldn’t do the thing and that thought to the forefront that I realize what happened. Sigh. ADHD requires me to do an exhausting amount of thought-monitoring.
Since I need constant reminders to be kind to myself, I feel safe in assuming that other people need those reminders, too.
Here, I’ll say it big so we all get the message.
Please Be Kind To Yourself!
There’s a lot going on it the world. There’s a lot going on in your life. You probably have lots of stuff to do. You’re probably trying to adjust to normal life after the flurry of December, no matter what you celebrated (or didn’t celebrate) last month.
That’s a lot of stuff to be carrying and working on all at once.
And, if you are also trying to build a new habit, change an old habit, or trying to expand your life in any way, then that’s even more work for your poor brain.
The only way to proceed, the only way to make any change, the only way to adapt to new circumstances, is by being kind to yourself.
As you forge ahead towards the life you want, you are going to have easy days and challenging days.
Some tasks will be really hard.
Some things will feel impossible.
Sometimes things will be so easy you will wonder if you did them wrong.
All of that is part of the process of change.
In fact, it’s all part of the process of being a human.
If you are mean to yourself when things are hard (or if you dismiss your efforts when things go well), you won’t be making them any easier, you’ll just be making yourself feel worse about them.
However, if you remind yourself that these ups and downs are a normal part of being human, a normal part of change, if you decide to treat yourself with compassion, then you will actually be making the hard parts a bit easier.
If you celebrate your efforts – even if things felt easy, you still DID them – then you will be reminding yourself that even easy tasks matter.
And that self-compassion, that self-kindness, will help you see yourself as a person who keeps moving towards the life you want, tiny step by tiny step, instead of getting trapped in judging yourself for imperfection.
So, again, always, as a favour to me, please, please, please:
Be kind to yourself in your thinking, in your planning, and in your doing.
When you choose self-kindness, you aren’t ‘letting yourself off the hook’, you aren’t ‘lacking discipline’, you are creating the circumstances for your own ease, happiness, and success.
Being kind to yourself can be hard work sometimes* but it is totally worth it.
With that said, here’s your gold star for today!
No matter where you are in your thinking, planning, or doing, I hope you’ll accept this gold star in recognition of your efforts.
The scope and volume of our efforts will vary from task to task, day to day, and person to person, but they all count.
Even the effort to assess your capacity and then decide how to proceed is gold-star-worthy.
It takes work not to just react to the ambient pressure around you and that counts, just as all of your other efforts do.
Go you!
And…
Go Team Us!
A drawing of a gold star with rounded corners. The star is sprinkled with dots of darker gold and is trimmed with green. The background of the drawing is a somewhat irregular green grid with a gold dot in each square and the drawing is framed in green.
*Isn’t it kind of weird how *easy* it is to default to being mean to ourselves and how hard it can be to choose self-kindness? Yet, being mean to ourselves in the moment makes it harder for us to get where we want to go and being kind to ourselves will make things easier in the long term. Odd, right?
One of the things I love about Yoga With Adriene is how often she returns to the idea of ‘Find What Feels Good’ when it comes to a yoga practice.*
I think it is a great guideline for many practices but particularly for movement practices because so many fitness instructors and influences are all about what looks good or about burning calories or about crushing one thing or another.
I feel decidedly meh about all of those things but I feel GREAT about leaning into ways to feel good about the practices I am bringing into my life.
And I am hoping that as you work towards expanding your life in whichever ways you choose, your feelings will be a key factor in your decision-making process.
It is worth figuring out how to make your practices feel good to you.
In fact, “How do I want to feel?” can be one of the most important starting points in any project** because it gives you some criteria for choosing activities, timelines, conspirators, and actions.
Once you know how you want to feel, you can identify what actions to take, how and when to take them, and who to take them with.
And considering how you want to feel gives you a bit of extra motivation, an extra sense of why you are choosing to do what you are doing.
When it comes to fitness and wellness, your feelings aren’t just about feeling good, bad, excited, or whatever, they can also get specific to the practices you are considering.
You can ask yourself “How do I want my legs to feel?” or “What does strong feel like?” or “How does ‘feeling energetic’ show up in my body?” And then you can decide how to work towards those feelings/how to track them/how to motivate yourself in the search for them.
And, of course, my ADHD brain won’t let me get away without considering this possible hitch:
Sometimes, the thing that will feel good in the long term doesn’t feel good now.
For example, the feeling of having strong abs will be great in many ways but doing plank right now may not feel good at all.
In fact, the effort required may feel downright discouraging.
And I am not going to suggest that you put a lot of energy into convincing yourself that something you don’t enjoy feels good (but if that works for you, have at it!)
Instead, I am going to suggest that you find something that feels good about it – maybe you can focus on how good it feels to check that exercise off of your list, or how good it feels to see the number on your timer creep up, or, even, how good it feels to stop!
And you might spend a bit of time digging deep into your imagination to generate a sense of how it will feel to have strong abs, the things that will be easier for you to do, the way your body will respond to future challenges as a result. Perhaps knowing you are giving a gift to your future self will help your sacrifice feel good in the moment.
I have a lot more to say this topic but I don’t have a lot of time to say today so I am going to pause the discussion here and get to the gold star portion of our post:
Here are your three small gold stars for your efforts today. You can award them to yourself for three separate things or you can pile them all in for one thing.
I know you are working on things, whether you are at the thinking stage, the planning stage or the action stage.
And I know your capacity will vary from day to day.
Please celebrate whatever the you of today is able to do, no matter how small, because your effort counts and your work matters.
Be kind to yourself out there!
Go Team Us!
A drawing of three small gold stars hanging from strings at the top of the notebook. In the bottom right corner and the top left corner there are a series of curved black lines that alternate between being filled with a gold stripe and featuring a line of black dots. The background of the whole image features a bunch of small black dots.
*In fact, Find What Feels Good is the name of her app.
**In many other contexts – relationships, presentations, web design, displays, “How do I want them to feel?” can also be an important question but it is less relevant for your fitness and wellness, of course!
Here we are in day two of 2026, and I have a reminder for you when it comes to new habits, resolutions, and activities:
YOU CAN PICK SOMETHING FUN.
I know, I know! We get so many messages this time of year about crushing our goals, and about dedication and determination, and about how hard we must work to be better, better, better.
And to that, I say, “Meh.”
If that kind of approach inspires you, then please forge ahead.
BUT
If that kind of talk makes you feel kind of tired and worn out before you even start, then please remember that your new year doesn’t have to be filled with that stuff.
You can choose a fun path that will lead you where you want to go.*
That might mean picking fun or whimsical activities or it might mean being fun and whimsical while doing a more straightforward activity.
If you wanted a fun or whimsical fitness goal, you could try a new dance video every week or you could challenge yourself to find specific items on your walks (kind of like a scavenger hunt.)
If you want to get stronger instead of lifting weights, you could pick items around your house that you’re going to practice lifting.
If you want/have to do ordinary activities and you can’t find a fun version, you can choose fun outfits or accessories, specific music or podcasts, or ask someone fun to keep you company while you get things done.
The main message here is that trying new things, taking on new habits, adding to your fitness or your wellness levels, does not have to be a slog.
I just want you to be kind to yourself, to be good to yourself, and to be able to expand your life in ways that will be satisfying for you, without feeling like the whole thing is a punishment.
Expanding your life may take effort, it may take focus, but it doesn’t have to be awful.
The days of “no pain, no gain” are long behind us.
When it comes to any fitness or wellness goal you might have this year, there is probably a fun way for you to achieve it, or, at the very least a way, to have more fun in the process.**
REMEMBER: Just because something is fun doesn’t mean it’s not working.
So, Team, please be kind to yourselves out there and try to make things a little more fun when you can.
Go Team Us!
Here’s a happy gold star for your efforts today:
PS – I have been seeing a lot of people using punch cards and bingo cards to keep track of their plans and resolutions this year and that seems like a pretty easy way to add some fun to the process. If drawing isn’t your thing, you could type your plans into blocks in a table/spreadsheet or you could use a site like this one.
*For example, a few years ago, one friend of mine decided to spend the year trying different types of tea and another friend resolved to add more colour to her wardrobe. Now, those aren’t fitness goals, but I could argue that they are wellness goals. And pursuing those goals definitely added more fun to my friends’ lives.
**I get that not every part of every thing can be fun, some tasks and activities just have to be endured, but we don’t have to use that as an organizing principle for every goal.
Initially, I thought that I would follow my pattern from the last two months and just pick 12 things for the 12th month.
But then I realized that I didn’t actually feel like trying new things right now. Instead, I wanted to find a gentle rhythm for this month.
So kind of picked an overarching goal. Two actually…
The first thing I want is to feel more relaxed as the month goes on instead of feeling more and more pressured.
Achieving that goal starts with paying a bit more attention to the things I have taken on, what my role in those things should be, and, most importantly, to remember that I don’t have to be available every hour of every day. *
So, paying a bit more attention can help me keep my work and my tasks in perspective and to ensure they are better scaled to my time.
The other side of this goal is to actively choose activities that help me feel more relaxed, and less like I’m being bounced from task to task.
I’ve picked three for December – yoga, meditation, journaling.
And I’m going to do each of those three things 12 times this month.
In fact, since December started last week, I have already done 30 minutes of yoga three times, I’ve done 10 minutes of meditation twice, and I’ve done two 30 minute sessions of Yoga Nidra. I haven’t done a lot of journaling, but there’s still lots of time left this month.
The second thing I want for myself this month is to focus on having as much fun as I can.
My approach to this one is a bit harder to describe but basically, I am looking at each day’s to-do list and making sure that it includes something fun. It might be the smallest thing, but I’m still making sure it gets in there and I refuse to make it my lowest priority task.
If I come down to a choice between something fun and something that feels like a duty or an obligation, then I’ve been looking carefully at that duty/obligation to ensure it really needs to be done at this point in the day, in the week, in the month or if it needs to be done at all.
I have successfully eliminated several tasks this way and increased my fun dramatically.
And if I can’t eliminate an obligation, I have been trying to figure out ways to make it a bit more fun or interesting. I made myself some excellent tea to take with me to run errands. I saved an episode of my favourite podcast to listen to while cleaning the bathroom. You get the idea.
*****
I’m not saying that the first week or so of December has been stress-free or anything but things definitely feel better because I am paying attention, doing relaxation activities, and choosing to have more fun.
I wish you some ease and relaxation this month and I hope you don’t have to work too hard to find it.
We all know that phones don’t take great photos of the moon but I like how this turned out. Image description: a photo of last week’s ’Cold Moon’ full moon. This was taken before it was fully dark so the sky is nice purple colour and we are looking through the bare branches of a snow dusted tree to see the full moon in the sky. The moon itself looks like it has a thick halo around it. Part of my truck is visible in the foreground and in the background are a variety of houses with warm lights in their windows, snow on their lawns, and one in the centre has red Christmas lights on display.
*My ADHD is a HUGE factor in this. I have trouble assessing the scale of tasks and how long they will take, I struggle to know how much is ‘enough’ to contribute to a project, I lose track of how much time has passed or how long something has taken me to do, and I often want to respond to things right away so I don’t forget them. That latter thing often puts me on other people’s schedules instead of my own and that is NOT good for my brain.
PS – Now, I recognize that I am writing from a position of privilege here. I have sufficient control over my schedule, my finances, and my day-to-day tasks to enable me to take action to reduce my stress this way and that is not true for everyone. Please don’t take this post as ‘two simple tricks to make everything better’ – that’s not what I am aiming for.
December’s calendar from Action for Happiness is all about small actions you can take to improve your own happiness levels while offering support and help to those around you.
And while many of us are inclined to be as generous with our time and money as we possibly can at this time of year, that inclination can also be overwhelming. So, it can be really helpful to have some ready-made suggestions available for when we need them. You can even add them to your Google Calendar.
Image description: The December 2025 Action for Happiness Calendar. Each day of the month lists a different December Kindness to try – a small action like “Look for something positive to say to everyone you speak to” or “Say hello to your neighbour and brighten up their day.” Each calendar block is either blue or green and the bottom of the calendar features cartoon images of some of the suggested activities including things like helping someone carry something upstairs, or picking up litter.
So, go ahead, try a few, try them all, or make up your own list of small ways to do good throughout December.
As a sidenote, I’ll be back with daily “Making Space 2025” posts starting on December 1 so you can use this calendar for prompts to be kind to others and my posts as prompts to be kind to yourself all month.
It may not be easy but it will be straightforward.
This video, entitled “Giving is a Gift” features Vanessa King from Action for Happiness. In this still image, she is sitting on the left hand side and the title of the video is in red on the right hand side. Ms. King has shoulder-length light brown hair, she is wearing a red jacket with a black shirt under it, and she has long earrings that are 3 stacked stars. She is smiling and looks happy. There is a narrow table with vases and other decorative items on it in the background.
Checking back and reflecting on what I have done is always interesting. And novel, because I’m usually that person who doesn’t look back often; I’m too busy chasing the next fun thing. Here’s what I had planned to do. How have things gone since my mid-year check in?
Camp more at the cottage property. My friend Mel was only available for one long weekend, and we had no time for hiking or canoeing. However, we did manage a proof of concept with the cats. Interior finishing is continuing to progress and the cats didn’t escape and get eaten by a bear, so this is definitely going to be a repeat project for next year, once I have electricity to run the heat and water pump.
Bike at least 2,000 km. I might hit 200. The knees are still sore, but I’m continuing to work at physio exercises to stretch and strengthen the offending areas. I have my e-bike back in service for the first time since last fall and I have gone out for a couple of longer rides. There are a few fun group rides coming up. I hope to get out to at least one, because I miss that social activity a lot. And it’s almost time to set up my bike on the trainer and see whether I’ll use it this year.
Read one book a month: goal complete and exceeded! Thank you Ottawa Public Library and your interlibrary loan service. I’m anticipating some quiet days in November and December when I can curl up in bed with a stack of magazines.
Cooking one new recipe a week, with lots of vegan and vegetarian, using what’s in my pantry as much as possible, has shifted a little again. I have decided to focus more on making sure my plate is at least half full of vegetables. I even spent a couple of months tracking what I ate (not quantities though). For the first time in years, my most recent blood tests show my cholesterol comfortably in the normal range, so yay me!
Gardening in a drought was a bit of a disaster. Enough said. I am already thinking about how to make my gardens more climate-resilient for next year.
Swimming 200km a year: I’m close to halfway there, but definitely will not meet this one. I am counting wins in that I reconnected with some old swimming friends, and made a few new ones.
Me with old friends Michelle and Lois at the lake in September. We first met in a swim program many years ago, but headed off to different clubs when that pool closed a decade ago. It has been great to reconnect and swim together again.
Crafting was all over the place: I had fun at my textiles conference and followed up with a six-week course on one of the techniques I learned. There has been no art at all, but one of my really fun challenges has been making a pair of mittens patterned after those worn by Bernie Sanders at the first Trump inauguration, using a pattern I have mostly designed on my own.
Sewing continues to not happen.
Decluttering has definitely been a mixed bag, since I have taken on the challenge of cluttering at Mom’s. Her basement is being cleared, but mostly to my house. I am struggling to keep up with moving things onwards to their final home. It all makes me more determined than ever to tackle my own stuff.
Vacation to visit family and friends in southern Ontario ended up being too short, but it was fun to meet up with all the other bloggers for Sam’s birthday.
Elder care continues to consume way too much time, and yet I know it is precious time as Mom won’t be around forever. The realities of discovering how “not independent” Mom is, after spending a lifetime seeing her as very feminist and independent is shocking. It has me thinking a lot about how to ensure my own independence as I age, and simplify all the decision-making for my kids when they need to take over. An updated list of accounts and passwords would be a good start!
Most of my friends seen to be struggling with similar aging parent challenges, on top of their own health issues. So minimal get-togethers to just hang out. We’re all too tired. Heck, I was too tired even to relax in my hammock.
I haven’t been loud with my activist voice, but I did use my voice for an adventure. I joined in the production of one of the medieval York Corpus Christi plays, finished up my costume (that June sewing deadline on my original list), and acted the part of one of the three wise men.
I’m on the right of a small raised outdoor stage, presenting my gift of incense to the Virgin Mary, accompanied by her maid servant. Another wise man in blue is kneeling on the left, and in the background, you can just glimpse Herod and a soldier waiting for their next cue.
Will I bother to update this list again? Probably not. It’s already almost the end of the year, and I doubt much will change between now and then. Besides, I could use that precious blogging time for a nap.
I will make another list for next year. My goals are always wildly ambitious, but I’m learning that checking in on them helps me to refocus and to remember my successes, no matter how modest.
