Katy Hamilton

Well, it’s a brand shiny new year once again, and although Santa sadly failed to deliver the helicopter, chocolate Albert Hall, and so on, Christmas was pretty great and a much-needed chance to relax. As the fireworks went off at not-quite-midnight on 1st January, I stood with friends and discussed our expectations for the coming twelve months. Did we have resolutions? Were there plans in the diary, goals to aim for, plots afoot?

The answer, it seemed, was yes and no. We all had thing we’d like to get done, and in some cases, deadlines and planning that would bring things to fruition by a given month, or a given season. But there was also a sense of not really knowing what to expect, and not wanting to pre-empt the future by making lists. So unlike my Christmas missive, there is no list of resolutions for 2016. There is no series of firm decisions that will lead me to Where I Want To Be by this time next year. And I’m really delighted about that, for a very simple reason: reviewing your life, aims, achievements and ambitions once a year is not enough. I reckon once a week, in fact, is more the kind of frequency we should be aiming for.

Consider this. Where do we first come across the concept of the annual review? School. Once a year – and not even in January – we are tested, our work marked and judged on an in-school and national scale, and knocked up a level or left where we were before. (Sort of like Donkey Kong, but with spelling tests.) When we have passed each level, our progress is discussed with our parents, and amongst our teachers. We are learning all the time, of course… but the direction of our lives, until we are 16, is largely determined by someone else’s system of yearly assessment.

Then we are given some freedom. Will we stay on to do A-levels? Go to university? Take one degree, or several? With each passing stage we acquire more freedom, more independence… but we are still being judged on an annual basis. Finally, we make it to the world of work. And if we work for a company, they too will take you aside once a year to review your performance, your pay, your suitability for the role, and so on. And in addition to this external audit, on New Year’s Eve, as your sway gently to Auld Lang Syne in a warm, fuzzy champagne haze, you resolve on your plans for the year ahead. Diets! Joining the gym! Taking up a new hobby, paying more attention to the garden, learning to play the guitar, and so on.

But this is not really enough. Remember when you were still at school? Remember when every day felt like it lasted for aaaaages, and the idea of not seeing your best friend from 4pm on one day til 9am on the next was so awful, and so long, that you had to call them at home and sit on the line for hours talking about Extremely Important Stuff until your parents shouted at you to hang up before the phone bill matched the national debt of a small South American country? Our sense of time alters as we get older, of course. But our need to review our actions, thoughts and feelings should not.

A couple of years ago, I started keeping a journal. I don’t write in it every day – far from it, in fact – but it’s somewhere to remember things, and unpack situations or events that have affected me in good or bad ways. It is supplemented, of course, by conversations with close friends. But the journal has revealed something really fascinating. It has shown me, looking back on past entries, how my own decision to cope, and get on with things, and be a grown-up, often means that I mis-remember the severity of a bad situation, or at what point I started to feel worried, or tired… or conversely, what a big deal some positive events were, and how much they affected me at the time. We’re all so busy pretending to be adults (well, I am, anyway), that we can lose sight of how much little things affect us. Because we no longer sit on the phone for three hours a night picking over the details of the day with our best friends.

So I don’t have any new year’s resolutions. I don’t even have any new month’s resolutions. I intend to take 2016 week by week, and write in my journal, and talk to my mates, and see if I can’t spot things that could go very right – or, indeed, very wrong – quickly enough to do something about before the next fireworks display. How can you possibly know what the whole year is going to look like from here? Leave that to the people who manage your annual review. Buy a notebook and write cool things in it. Look at them every week. Do them. Have an adventure! Who knows what you’ll get to try for the first time? And from here in London, Happy New Week of the 4^th January. I’ve got a good feeling about it.