Being Intentional in 2024

I've chosen my word for the new year

Photo from mrs_fox from Getty Images Pro on Canva Pro

Four years ago, when I adopted the practice of selecting a word for the year, I did so because I generally suck at resolutions. I’m not good at making a list of goals for the year and then working to achieve them. In an act of self-awareness, I shifted my thinking about how to move forward into a new year. I gave up goal-setting and started shaping my goals around bigger themes.

In 2023 that meant shaping my plans around the idea of moving “forward.” I self-published a book because it was time to start taking myself more seriously as a writer and look at different avenues for how I could achieve my writing dreams. I trained for and ran a half-marathon because I wanted to renew my health journey as I continue to move into my mid-40s. I worked with my

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partner to put together a presentation proposal for the national English teacher conference to move forward in our professional goals and our proposal was accepted. In big and small ways, the idea of moving forward followed me all year long.

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Looking Forward in 2023

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After a year of pushing myself to keep moving life forward, I’ve decided to slow things down a bit by focusing on being “Intentional.”

For anyone who knows me, saying that I’m choosing to slow down seems laughable, and I agree. I do not move slowly. I am not typically patient. I do not rush tasks, but I often have too many things in the fire at the same time. I want to do it all, I try to be it all, and there are times I feel like I’m a match burning at both ends.

Being intentional also means fighting against my nature, against falling back on what my husband semi-lovingly calls “Sarantees.” I have my suspicions that 2024 is going to be a challenging year for a lot of us, at least for my American readers. But I refuse to believe that it can’t also be a good year, a year when we start a much-needed process of healing in many different sectors of our lives. And to do my part, I plan to focus on being more intentional in several areas of my life.

Writing

My camping memoir has been submitted to one publishing house and I’ve also submitted to two reputable hybrid publishing houses. If none of those pan out, I will start the process of self-publishing with hopes to get it out into the world by summer. I’m very proud of the work I’ve done on the book, I’m eternally grateful for the work that my beta readers did on it, and almost six years after starting it, I cannot wait to finally have it in people’s hands. (You can start reading the pre-revision beta draft here.)

With that nearly six-year project nearing completion, I want to finally do NaNoWriMo in November 2024. Since fiction has never been my strong suit, I plan to start writing some short fiction to rebuild the miniscule fiction writing muscles I developed when I was in graduate school over a decade ago. My goal is one new story every other month, but we’ll see if life gets in the way of that goal in the first few months of the year.

On my Substack, I hope to be more intentional about what I publish and what I offer all of my readers. Look for more consistent offerings for my paid subscribers (paid subscriptions are on sale for the rest of the year and will go up to $6 a month in January) and I’m going to lean into being even more authentic. Travel posts will go away until it is time for travel, but we are planning a family vacation to Yellowstone, so you have a lot to look forward to after July 1.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Health

I’ve been doing a lot better, but I can do more. Middle age is kind of a kick in the butt, and I know that it’s going to be a journey. I’m trying to be more consistent about getting to the gym to do more than just run and my training plan for the Indianapolis 500 half-marathon includes doing more to strengthen my legs. When I ran in St. Louis last year, it wasn’t my lungs that gave me trouble, it was my exhausted body. I know that I need to take care of more than just my cardiovascular system, so it is time to step up the training in different ways.

I’m also working on therapy and seeing the value it has had for our daughter. While I’ve done a lot of emotional healing (and let’s be honest, some of us write because it is therapy), there is a lot more healing to be had.

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

Stewardship

Growing up as a churchworker’s kid, stewardship was always about how much we were giving to our church. However, I want to be intentional in a lot of different kinds of stewardship.

It starts with budgeting. When we did a financial planning class many years ago, I dove headfirst into budgeting.¹ I was REALLY good at it, and I kept our family on a straight and narrow financial path. But like many people, a lot has happened in the last four years, and I completely fell away from consistently budgeting. I want us to be more intentional about how we spend our money, and in order to do that, I need to get back to keeping track of our expenses. This also becomes more important the more I write and try to earn money from those ventures.

Intentional giving is part of intentional spending. When everything shut down in 2020, I’ll admit that it became harder to regularly give to our church. Then the election and insurrection happened and I started questioning where we should put any of our money.² Then I lost my job and uncertainty about the future was layered on top of the questions about where we should be sending financial donations. I know that giving matters because organizations depend on the generosity of others, and I want to give in a way that makes a meaningful impact.

We need to be more intentional about our environment. I’m a terrible housekeeper and paper is my archnemesis. My family needs me to do better and I need me to do better (because if I’m being completely transparent, that PMS anxiety that I get every month is often exacerbated by the clutter in our house.) I also need to be better about asking for help. But this also goes beyond our clutter. I want to focus on less stuff (but leave my books alone) and instead pursue quality. I think it’s time to finally put up that clothesline that I keep telling my husband I want so we can start lowering our carbon footprint. And we are looking into solar panels and hoping to have a decision made by the end of the year, doing our part to lower our carbon footprint even more.

Photo by Mischa Frank on Unsplash

Relationships

Friendships matter and the older I get, the more I realize how much I need to have those moments with friends. And thankfully, as our kids get older, both my husband and I feel like we have a little more freedom for those occasional nights out away from each other to spend time with friends.³ I keep telling him to do it more often, and I know that I need to be better about doing it more often as well.

I’m trying to save birthdays in my calendar so I no longer rely on Facebook to tell me when it is someone’s birthday so I can send them a personal message instead of posting it on their wall for all to see. I’m spending more time away from using social media and when I am there, I’m fighting against my worst impulses from 2015-2020 and avoiding posting stuff that my loved ones refused to read anyway. If I’m going to use social media, I want it to be about being social again instead of shouting into the void.

And with only three and a half years left with four of us under one roof, I’m doing everything I can to make sure we have those important family moments together as well.

Photo by Woody Kelly on Unsplash

So that is my word for 2024, and I’m hoping that I am able to say at the end of the year that I did my best to keep my word.

Do you pick a word for the year? If you do, what are you planning to use for your word?

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1. And while I don’t love admitting that it was a Dave Ramsey class and I have a lot of feelings about him now, at the time, it probably saved our family.

2. I mean, my level of trust was completely broken.

3. While still prioritizing date night over that, because not having to worry about babysitters anymore is glorious.