In response to my December blog Keep Walking, long-time reader and fellow blogger Neil replied: Excellent essay. We should fight the good fight with our heads held high. And, simultaneously, we should enjoy life as much as possible too. It was as if he’d read my outline for this month’s post.

For many reasons, 2024 was a challenging year, both personally and politically. I’m generally a positive, happy, upbeat person, but in 2024, too many mornings began with shower musings that were dark and fretful. No way to start a day. Or live a life. So I’ve been making a list on “Keep Notes” (marvelous feature of smartphones!) of what I want to zero in on this coming year—activities that give me joy, that maintain physical health, that in some way make the world a better, safer place for all of us. I don’t want to leave happiness to chance—when I “have time.” In my experience, we never have time. We must make time. Give the activities that bring us the highest satisfaction top priority.   

Couch Potatoes No More!

First of all, if we want to enjoy life and have energy for the good fight, we’ve got to get up out of our chairs, get away from the funk, and start moving forward. It’s amazing how energized you can feel by simply taking a brisk stroll around your hood. Got cooking duty tonight? Put on some vinyl, a CD, or Spotify and bop to the beat as you sauté, roast, or grill. I find dancing around my kitchen makes any chore lighter and happier. Feeling “sporty?” Shoot some hoops at your local playground, rollerblade through the park, or bike the backroads of your town. This last is one of my favorites—the tranquility of riding through cornfields under blue skies, the breeze sifting my hair. Heaven! Wintry where you are right now? Many communities offer salsa and swing dance classes. If you already have a partner, great, but don’t hang back because you’re solo. Lots of people take these classes and instructors make sure everyone is paired. So, groove to the music and dance the night away! Or grab a friend and go bowling. Ed and I go with my kids each year during the holidays. We all suck and we all have a great time.    

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Speaking of friends, one giant step to a better, happier world is connecting with other people. And the best place to begin is right where you live. According to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, only 26% of Americans said they know most of their neighbors.          

So, get to know your neighbors if you don’t already. Throw an informal party on your lawn. You provide the drinks and the space, your neighbors bring their own deck chairs and a snack or dish to share. This is how I’ve met most of the folks in my hood. We now get together seven or eight times a year and keep in frequent touch between celebrations.

Knowing your neighbors can be a great source of strength, joy, and mutual assistance. Over the years, not only have we partied together, we have fed each other’s pets, watered plants and collected the mail of neighbors on vacation. We’ve prepared meals for the families of several neighbors after they underwent major surgery. As I take my daily walk, it’s a rare day I don’t see one or more of my neighbors out raking or gardening or reading on their porch and pause to enjoy a brief chat. Community—it’s a good feeling.    

If Not Now, When?

We’ve all got ‘em—projects we’d like to undertake, new skills we’d love to acquire whether for our own pleasure or to make a career move, possibly into an entirely different field. But we’ve put off trying/starting/doing because we’re not sure how it will pan out, or the thing we want to do seems so vast, how will we ever carve out the time between the laundry and the cooking and the yardwork, all those daily repetitive tasks that eat up the clock?

If the things that would bring more joy to your life keep getting shifted to next week, next month, next year, I suggest taking a cue from that timeless Nike slogan and Just do it! Dive in. Take a leap. If something didn’t work out before, try again or try differently.  

As a writer, I can tell you writing is the fun part. It’s getting the finished works out there that demands so much time, so much research, new skills. I submitted my first novel in what would prove to be the dying days of the traditional publishing industry, when there were houses galore and you sent your manuscript over the transom to be read by a real editor who brought his or her favorites to a company meeting and campaigned for the author. Long story short, those many publishers have been absorbed in the U.S. by the “Big Five.” To get a publisher now, you must first get an agent. To get an agent, you must develop a query letter, a synopsis of your book, an outline. And even if you are in the 1%-2% who land an agent, that’s no guarantee your book will find a home.

Alternatives include indy houses which may or may not charge you part of the cost of publishing, and you will definitely be handling all the marketing (lots of time); self-publishing where you will front all the costs including cover art and spend most of your valuable writing time finding avenues—a blog, for instance—to get your name out there. Or you can try to build a huge readership for your blog and market your book(s) to them, as Andy Weir did so successfully in 2011 with his book The Martian. Crown Publishing Group took notice of this and published the novel in 2014. Within weeks, a movie deal was signed. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2016.      

For too long, I’ve been going in circles, so I’m making 2025 the year I map Plans A, B, and C—including the skills/actions I need to acquire/take for each—and just start DOING. Because, seriously, there’s nothing to lose.

What would you like to change, learn, do? 

Get Out of Dodge Now and Again   

A Grand Tour via a luxury liner is not required to rejuvenate the spirit. Instead, you can explore the art galleries and museums of a city within driving/train/bus distance. Attend a concert of whatever music turns you on be it Mozart, Taylor Swift, or contemporary jazz sensation, Masego. I’m a Rock & Roll girl, but an evening on the lawn at Tanglewood, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, played by the virtuoso violinists and pianists of our time—the starry night overhead, picnic hamper and a bottle of wine at hand—is moving, healing, a deep and profound joy. Ed and I also love to drive up to Brattleboro, Vermont or Portsmouth, New Hampshire and make a day of browsing bookshops for new and used reads. And don’t overlook the restorative power of the great outdoors. One of my favorite places to wander is the Quabbin Reservoir, a one-hour drive from my house. I could roam this 25,000-acre preserve forever, under a sky so vast, it provides much-needed perspective about the universe and our humble place in it.  

The People United Will Never Be Defeated

Echoing blogger-friend Neil’s words uptop—We should fight the good fight with our heads held high—I believe one of the most important actions we can undertake in this new year is to join our like-minded fellow beings and work together for the survival of our democracy and the planet. As then-Senator Obama stressed in his 2008 presidential campaign speech: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”  

If you’re in a sizeable city, you may already know of or belong to a local organization fighting for our freedoms and our environment. But if you live outside a metropolitan area or you’re not sure which org or orgs you’d like to dedicate some time and energy to, just click on https://www.democracy2025.org/ and scroll down to where you see This is the united frontline in the fight for our democracy. There you’ll find a rolling tape of more than 280 organizations who have joined together to preventour democracy/planet from being trashed and stolen by the greedy billionaires and their fascist buddies. Choose one and get involved—letter writing, phone-banking, registering voters, marching.

As someone who grew up in the Civil Rights era and came of age protesting the Viet Nam War, I can attest to the truth that fighting alongside others for what you hold dear is one of the most satisfying, uplifting experiences you will ever have.

The bottom line: No one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves. And together, WE CAN.

Get a Life!

As I said, I’m a writer. Shaping plots, creating characters, taking them through whatever transformational journey is theirs to travel—that’s what I love doing. Fighting for our country, our world—that gives me hope and strength. So what if the patches on the walls (recent repairs to “plaster fatigue” in an 1895 house) that need priming and painting go bare a week, a month, a season longer. Does it really matter? If I’m devoting my energies to that which makes me happiest—writing, and that which gives me hope—banding together with others to save our freedoms, then in my book, that’s a life well-lived. I mean, in the final moments, who reflects on their life and regrets that the hallway suffered unpainted patches for several months? At the end of the road, it’s not the chores delayed or left undone we regret, but the myriad hours spent on things that didn’t really matter. The time lost to not doing what we loved most. What made us feel alive. So, here’s to truly living in 2025!