Month-in-Review Highlights: December 2023

My not-too-shabby holiday cookie platter. From left to right: Black sesame shortbread, sugar, and salted chocolate-chunk shortbread. Lausanne, Switzerland. December 24, 2023.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends. Previously, I used these posts to hold myself accountable on progress toward my annual goals. Starting in January 2023, I broadened these posts to address more generally my observations and experiences for the month. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

Happy New Year!

I did, indeed, spend a portion of the first day of 2024 reviewing my 2023 progress against the goals I’d set for myself—always an interesting reflection point.

By December, I knew which goals I’d hit by year-end and which I’d miss. I find it annually interesting to see which goals I didn’t achieve that I wish I had achieved—and which ones I didn’t achieve that, in seeing them in black in a document with all achieved goals in gray, provoke no more than a mental shrug.

So many goals, each year, I’ve set out of some sort of idea of what I think I should do, rather than what I actually want or need to do to achieve my larger, broader-than-annual objectives.

In setting my goals for the year ahead, I took these reflections into account and tried to remove the “should do” objectives as best I could—but I do this each year. And each year I have goals I don’t care about not having achieved.

I also tried, when goal-setting for 2024, to eliminate goal-related activities that have become routine to the point that I do them without reflection or a need for self-motivation. If the activity’s become a habit, I don’t need to write it down as a to-do to keep on track. In a way, having made a productive, goal-achieving activity a habit counts as a win in itself, doesn’t it?

As I look back on 2023, I see that I had intense motivation around pushing forward with my fiction efforts and I feel really good—in expected and unexpected ways—about what I achieved on this count in 2023. I didn’t hit all my goals—in some cases because I have no control over certain aspects of the process—but I did everything I could do to achieve them, learned a lot along the way that I can apply and have already applied going forward, and I am really excited about what the year ahead holds for my writing work.

I did pretty well in other life facets, too. I checked off all health-related goals, for example. I checked off my language-learning objectives as well. While I read a lot less in French and watched less French television, I worked my language development through far more real-world interaction and engagement. These efforts pushed my progress vastly further than it would have gone if I’d continued with my 2022 learning methods. My language abilities have outstripped my earlier learning tools.

I no longer struggle with French reading comprehension—I don’t sometimes even realize in what language I’ve read something—and my aural comprehension, especially when it comes to television programming (where people tend to speak mostly clearly and formally, other than in “reality” shows), has reached the same level. Where I need more work is in real-world interaction, where slang and casual language and multiple accents—including my own—come into play.

In other goal areas, I mostly achieved the larger objective without maybe having the opportunity to do all the associated activities I’d planned to get there.

For example, I maybe didn’t get to connect as much in social gatherings as I’d have liked, but I engaged my need for community in so many other ways that, though I’d like to do more in the year ahead, I don’t feel isolated or malnourished interpersonally in ways I have in the past.

I didn’t travel to new areas as much as I’d set out for myself, either, but I traveled more than enough to sate my appetite and realized at a certain point in the year that I craved more time centering myself at home. More travel wouldn’t have served me.

I wish you a wonderful 2024. If you read along with me on this website, thank you. Here’s to more connection, more engagement, more creativity, and more time to breathe in the year ahead.