Goals for 2020

In mid-2019, I made a post describing my KALLISTI-related goals for the year. Here’s where they stand at year’s end:

• On KALLISTI, I had a goal of 1 post per week. I made 85 posts this year (86, if this one is included), a total of about 115,000 words after guesstimating how much of the 2019 XML backup consists of posts vs. code.
• I decided not to pursue doing more in the feminism series after the social media things that happened this summer; I think my energy can be directed elsewhere.
• Exiting any involvement with the UU has been fairly successful.
• I’m happy with my prayer routine right now.

In 2020, I’ve merged my religious goals with my normal life goals because I don’t really see them as separate.

Here are a few of them:

• Focus my online presence on KALLISTI.
• Read 30 books.
  • That was my goal in 2019, and it worked well. In 2020, I’m starting off — as I’ve mentioned — by reading Plato’s Republic, Laws, and Timaeus alongside whichever commentaries exist.
  • I will also read Conflict Is Not Abuse early in the calendar year.
• Meditate for 5-10 minutes per day. This improves my focus when I pray, so getting it consistent will be a major win for me in 2020.

Sometimes, I wonder if I need to focus on other religious things — like get better at divination — but the space that opens up for divination is so much like the bottomless and breathless intellectual space that it’s important to hit before writing devotional poetry so it flows properly. I was praying to Apollôn yesterday and realized that I prefer poetry and hieropoeia and that I love that creative space for what it is. I will be satisfied with the direction I have chosen.

There’s another project, tentatively called Unplacing, that could be useful. I don’t know what I will do with it, if anything, in 2020. It’s a theological … longform writing thing. I’m not a theologian or a community-sanctioned leader, and there must certainly be a qualified person who could write about coming to terms with the instability of American polytheist identity and how to overcome unhealthy, divisive things to actually be religiously healthy. Or maybe there isn’t. We’ll see what happens.

Over on PANGRAMMATIKÊ, I shared information about my writing/creative goals, which include finishing/publishing Acts of Speech, a religious poetry chapbook. I also provided some statistics about the time I’ve spent.

Here’s what is relevant to KALLISTI. About 100 hours of my time on this Earth were spent in WordPress this year (which means KALLISTI). I spent 400 hours on social media, 338 of them on Twitter — which may sound truly horrifying (it is) until one understands that I was on hiatus starting in August and thus rarely logged in. 338 hours a year is just under an hour per day, and I know others use Twitter more heavily than I do — it’s the only place where many of us can socialize with our ingroups because we’re so geographically dispersed.

My time on Twitter this week went up quite a lot, and after Lexember (a conlang thing) is over tomorrow, I’m fading back out. Beyond that — after thinking hard about my 2020 goals — I did my weekly divination, and the fact that I received Maxim #58 (ὅ μέλλεις, δός – do what you mean to do) alongside some things about speaking plainly and reaping what I sow tells me I’m on the correct track with what I’ve decided to do in 2020 (or that I need to persist in calibrating myself and cutting out extraneous things). None of us knows how much time we have, so it’s important to do what we can until it is up, and I pray for the endurance and capacity to give this run my best.

Happy Secular New Year. 🎉