Making New Years resolutions can feel a bit cliche and forced. If you need to do something, why wait until New Years to do it? How many of us make these resolutions every year only to forget about them by the end of the first week in January? 

Despite this, I think there's something to be said about the importance of creating routines or rituals that can tie up loose ends and help us to move forward. I like scheduling in times to take account of where I am with my life and what I've been doing recently that either adds to or detracts from my happiness. Didn't someone wise say something about madness being the process of doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different outcomes (anyone know who said it?). How can we really know if we're caught up in same patterns without some reflection? We do this in business all the time - review our annual results and then set achievable and tangible goals for the next year - so why does it seem so silly to devote the same amount of space and time to do it in our personal lives? 

This brings me to Reverb10, which I found through one of my favorite bloggers Susannah Conway. The idea is that every day in the month of December you get a prompt that makes you think about how the previous year went and to try and nail down where you want your path to go over the next twelve months. I like the idea of a structured accounting of where I am, especially because this year has been so full of change for me. I'm a few days behind, but I'm going to be posting these daily here (or at least for as long as I have an Internet connection - not sure how reliable the wifi is in Laos, which is where we're heading to next). 

If any of you are participating in Reverb10, please let me know. I'd love to read your entries if you're making them public. 

Image by me taken in Kamakura, Japan