New Year’s Ruminations for 2025

It’s a new year. When I worked full time the end of the year between Christmas and New Years served as a time to look back and reflect on the previous 12 months. A lot of that was enforced by the structure of my career, with annual performance reviews at the end of each year, and project planning for the next.

Now that I’m retired without a full time job I’m finding that this end of year ritual is becoming less and less a part of my life. To the extent that I still use the end of the year to reflect on the year, it tends to be a peripheral thing absorbed from the people around me who still do that. 

I also don’t do New Year’s resolutions, since they almost never stick. Making sustainable changes in your life is difficult. When I retired just over 4 years ago, I didn’t set out to improve my health. It just happened as a result of lower stress, improved diet and a less sedentary lifestyle.

But in the spirit of making changes in the new year, I’ve decided to make a concerted effort in 2025 to develop my craft as an artist. Thinking back over my life, my first 20 years (plus or minus) I was a kid, trying to figure out who I was as I grew up. My second 20 years (plus or minus) I was a student of science, developing into the professional scientist who I’d become for the third 20 years (plus or minus) of my life. As I enter the next phase of my life, I’m no longer a professional scientist, and I find myself returning to the artist that I was when I was a kid. I used to draw compulsively when I was a kid. At home, doing school sitting in the back of class bored, every spare minute of my time (when I wasn’t reading) I would spend my time drawing. Time to re-embrace that side of my life.

Plus a quick reminder that this is a perfect time of year to support small business artists by buying a custom made calendar for the coming year from my Etsy store. Check it out. :)