I’ve been doing (or at least reading about) several New Year’s challenges this week:

• Flow: 30 days of Yoga with Adriene
• New York Times Energy Challenge
• Washington Post Well + Being New Year’s Tuneup (winner of “most chipper challenge title”)
• Suleika Jaouad’s New Year’s Rumi and other writing prompts
• Apartment Therapy’s annual January Cure (to make your house decluttered and magnificent if it isn’t already)

As expected, I haven’t adhered strictly to all of the challenges. Here are some things that are definitely didn’t happen:

Vision board (Apartment Therapy): I am so not making a vision board (no offense to anyone here who is a fan). Maybe this is because a) sorting through hundreds of choices would get me bogged down, never to emerge from the vision-bog again; and b) I sort of have a vision already, which is my place– only rearranged, edited, repaired, and repainted (a set of tasks for spring/summer/uh, whenever). The hard part is the implementation of said vision. I am continuing forward, though: I emptied out a drawer, thew out (or rather put in a box to recycle, donate or throw out, as told by Apartment Therapy) and rearranged the remaining contents. Here’s my before and after:

Exhaustive/exhausting fitness testing (Washingon Post Tuneup): Yes, I agree that knowledge (even about my own level of fitness, etc.) is power. But, I was totally not up for working to fatigue/exhaustion/despair just because the Washington Post said so. Also, I’m extremely unhappy with their category setup for the test.

Then, after I pushed the cheery and demeaning “Golden” button, I was told to do the following with measurements of reps and time:

• stand on one foot
• sit and stand from a chair
• run or walk a mile
• hang from a pull-up bar
• BURPEES!

Okay, these aren’t actually bad. I might try some of them. But starting off a 5-day challenge in this way is daunting. Not so the NY Times’ Day 3 (of their 6-day energy challenge). Their assignment was this:

Over the course of three minutes, you’ll imitate a boxer, a ballerina, a tennis player, a basketball player, a runner, and, to cool down, a yoga practitioner.

This was fun. I pretended to hit a home run from my living room to across the street, imaginarily breaking windows even. The article suggested ballet moves, boxing jabs and footwork, tennis serves and returns, and basketball dribbling and layups (which I never quite got in gym class, but it matters not). I enjoyed myself, and it was a satisfying little exercise amuse-bouche. Yes, exercise snacking is approved by all sorts of health writers on the internet, and there’s some scientific evidence in its favor. I’ll write more about exercise snacking in a future post, but if you need some info now, here’s a graphic explanation from this paper:

And then there’s Flow: 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene. I did day 0, which involved listening. But I haven’t done any of days 1–5 yet.

I don’t know why I never seem to get around to doing Yoga with Adriene. I like Adriene, I like yoga, and I like her dog Benji. But instead of making a commitment to it and setting aside time each day, I just sort of hoped I would spontaneously start doing yoga with Adriene. It doesn’t seem to work that way, though.

On the other hand, I didn’t have to think at all about making a commitment to the writing/art prompts for Suleika Jaouad’s Rumi New Year’s challenge. I’m one day behind, but am steadily plowing through them all. They are behind a series of paywalls, but here is a screen shot of them:

My lack of art training doesn’t keep me from using my set of multicolored felt tip pens to doodle and noodle and swirl and dot and connect the dots and fill in to my heart’s content. It is so. much. fun. There’s no pressure to perform or attain any level of achievement. All I do is play and enjoy playing. Which, come to think of it, is what I enjoyed about pretending to be a baseball player or ballerina for 3 minutes. There are no expectations, no criteria, and no judging.

So, here’s my January challenge for you, dear readers: schedule in some pretend-activities, which are in fact activities in themselves. You can pretend to be a dancer, a dog, a great artist, an interior designer, a chef, a novelist, a musician, singer, neighborhood explorer, hot-tub swimmer, flower/house-plant arranger. No pressure. No before/after photos. No personal bests. Just fun.

You might take inspiration from this jaunty little yellow frog, who showed up in my search for “challenging”. Maybe it’s not easy being yellow, but it looks great on this little cutie. And January can look great on you, too.