Being Intentional in 2025
Let's try this again
When I picked “Intentional” for my word for 2024, I thought I was being really smart. I thought it would be both meaningful and easy. After all, how hard can being intentional with your life be?
Hard, it can be hard, especially since we cannot know the future.
2024 wasn’t a particularly difficult year for your family, but it was a year full of change. Our daughter is a busy sophomore and we’ve added learning how to drive to our to-do lists. Our son moved to a new school and started junior high and with it a far more intensive athletics schedule. My school year has kept me incredibly busy and it feels like I barely have time to breathe as I rush to get all of my planning and grading completed in the hours I have available before I run off to be an involved mom.
And yet I did work to be intentional. I didn’t just publish the memoir I have been working on for years, but I also scheduled as many events as possible both immediately before the official release and during the months following the September publication. I embraced being a local writer and I continue to look for more opportunities to share my books and blog work with fellow Hoosiers, all while working to expand my reach nationally and globally. I’ve worked on my health, running a second half-marathon and keeping up my yearly mammograms. I failed miserably at being intentional with our finances as we faced unexpected challenges and then had to work through them.
As I reached the end of the year and thought through what I wanted for my word for 2025, I realized I still wanted to focus on being more intentional. There were things I wanted to continue working on and areas where I had failed. So this is where I hope to do better moving into the new year.
Intentional With Relationships
I’ve written a lot about my difficulty with relationships. I’m a hopeless introvert and the older I get, the more I prefer to be at home. A lifetime of moving from one place to the next made maintaining relationships incredibly difficult, and this difficulty has extended into adulthood. (And my series Shifting Sand is going to continue exploring that theme in my life over the next year.)
But I also want to improve the relationships I already have and create new bonds. As we sat through one of the earlier basketball games this year, I told my husband we needed to start getting to know the names of our fellow parents because we’re hoping this will be a six-year relationship as we watch our son grow as a young man and player. I want to do less on social media and more over actual text and phone calls. I want to see friends more often in real life and find the time and space to get to know new people in person. Does this get harder as we get busier? Yes. But I also know that friendship matters. Relationships matter. And I need to step away from doing things online and work toward doing more in person.
After all, we can’t change the world by sitting behind a computer or phone screen. The greatest changes come when we connect with real human beings in real life. So I’m working on stepping away from “social” media and working to do more IRL 😜
Intentional With Writing
I had to be intentional with my writing for the majority of 2024 as I worked on publishing a book I have been writing and rewriting for several years. Yet I still kept up my weekly Friday release schedule. I worked ahead whenever I could. And I started diving into my faith explorations in Shifting Sand as I continue to process the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a churchworker’s kid who decided to go into churchwork. And I’ve been doing all of this while my teaching load seems to be getting more intensive and my two teenagers keep adding more to our calendar.
But I need to write. And I have a feeling that the next four years is going to give me a lot to process and writing is how I best do that. Being intentional as a writer means continuing with my writing therapy in Shifting Sand. It means finishing my “Midwestern Reflections on the Lone Star State” series and beginning the long process of turning that into a book. It means allowing myself to be more vulnerable as I connect our travel stories to my role as a citizen and mother.
And it also means leaning into my role as a local writer. I already have three events lined up for 2025. I’m hoping to have two more scheduled soon. And I will keep applying for every opportunity that comes my way. Doing so won’t just help me grow as a writer, it will also help me with intentional relationship-building.
Intentional With Stuff
I have too much stuff. My house is a disaster and one reason is I’m always trying to find places for the stuff. And if there’s one thing that I’m feeling more and more intensely the older I get (and the more I resist the social media tug), it’s that stuff is not making us happy or healthy.
Part of being intentional here will be working to be more intentional with our budgeting and being better with our finances. We’re hoping to get solar panels this year, and that only happens if we can stop spending money and declutter our lives at the same time.
I have stuff I’m ready to part with, and that probably means starting with the Barbie collection currently sitting in a closet. I’m trying to cut down our use of plastics and trash and will continue to do so this year. I got conned into bringing home a rosemary bush after the high school music gala, so maybe I can keep it alive with the help of our healthy compost pile and finally build the herb garden I’ve been foolishly desiring for years. (I am a notorious plant killer, which has prevented me from being brave enough to try.) Our kids need to go through their toys and I’m going to have to let them let go of the stuff they don’t want anymore. (While probably keeping a few things for possible future grandchildren, like the Little People pirate ship.)
By the end of the year, I’ll have to let you know how successful I’ve been at all of this.
So I’m going to stick with being intentional again this year, and I’m hoping it will help me focus on finding the good in 2025 and beyond.
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