I’ve never really set a New Year’s resolution, and I don’t plan to now, either. Around about this time last year though, I did decide to start writing morning pages again, and ended up sticking with it.
A few weeks into writing morning pages, I started to riff on some ideas from the past that I hadn’t brought into the world. They combined with other ideas on the page, and then morphed into something new: a love letter to California, told through binaural audio and slow observational poetry. A love letter that I’m actually writing.
A few months in, I was beginning to explore what writing meant to me in general. I started writing about writing, about reading and about storytelling. I unearthed something I knew, but had buried: I was supposed to write. I’ve always been in love with writing. I was supposed to write more. I vowed to start publishing writing online (hello).
A little later my morning pages were filled with questions and musings on how I might connect more of my life with writing. About how I could align my day job with writing. How I could build a community around writing. The stars—miraculously—aligned when an incredible friend, human and leader reached out about working together.
Later again and I’d started to write about my writing practice. About what morning pages meant to me, and how I might connect even more with the practice. I started to wonder what it might be like to write vs. type my pages… and then I actually started writing them… and through doing so healed a stubborn wound related to my handwriting.
I could go on. There are so many other moments in between those above, but the point is this: it all started with a humble commitment to just write morning pages every day. You could call that a resolution, but I didn’t think of it that way at the time. It wasn’t some grand idea or ambition. If anything, it felt like the opposite—something small; simple.
Writing morning pages changed my life in both big ways and small ways. I didn’t need to set a resolution to “write a love letter to California,” “start publishing my writing online,” “align my life and work with writing,” or “start writing by hand, in cursive.” I didn’t even know those were things that I wanted back then. Like, I didn’t really know.
Our ambitions unfold. They morph and change and they glom together with others, and that’s great. We needn’t wait to start something new. We needn’t declare those things as having failed or succeeded. Life is more messy than that. It’s more beautiful than that. Writing, and writing morning pages specifically, helped everything else to unfold.
I guess what I’m really trying to say—to myself more than anyone, but maybe it’ll help you too—is that to the extent you have a New Year’s resolution, it can be small and simple, and it can lead to other things. To be more pointed and to evangelize a practice that I love: it could be morning pages. They do exactly that. They can change your life.