Category Archives: Life

15 Years At The Internet Society… 🤯

15 years ago today, September 19, I joined the Internet Society to advocate for deployment of Internet standards such as IPv6, DNSSEC, and TLS. Being who I am, I wrote a long post back in 2011 about WHY I was making this change – much of which is still applicable today!

Coming from several startups, I kind of expected to perhaps be at “ISOC” for a couple of years and then move on. 🤣 So I find myself both amazed and delighted that 15 years later I’m still at the Internet Society – and with no interest in working anywhere else! As several people have asked why I’m still here, I think there are three reasons.

1 – The Mission

First is the vision and mission of the Internet Society. The vision is simply: “The Internet is for everyone.” The mission statement has actually changed from when I first joined and is now a bit longer and more detailed, but I’ll quote the first line: “The Internet Society supports and promotes the development of the Internet as a global technical infrastructure, a resource to enrich people’s lives, and a force for good in society.” The following lines go on to speak of building communities, advancing technologies and open standards, and advocating for policies to support these views.

I mean… how do you beat that? It’s a powerful view into ensuring the Internet works FOR us, and benefits society. All the problems and challenges I wrote about 15 years ago are still here – and in many cases they have only become worse (more walled gardens! more governments wanting to assert control!) and more challenging (the decline in trust in the Internet). Someone needs to be out there as a voice “for the Internet” and “for the people using the Internet”.

I am lucky enough to wake up every day with a job focused on trying to make the online world better for everyone. And I wake up excited to go to work – if anything, I struggle to “shut down” because I enjoy the work so much. That’s why I’m still here!

[Oh, and we’re hiring! Not many open positions right at this moment, but keep an eye out as we do have more at different times.]

2 – The People

Second, the people in the Internet Society community are AMAZING. Every day I meet people – staff or community members – who are incredible in their own ways. While I know a great amount about Internet technologies and the Internet community after 40-ish years working online, there are always people who know more… on technologies or regions or communities or more. One day I’ll learn something about quantum communications from someone deep in that world… another day I’ll learn about daily activities in Cameroon… or how government agencies work in Australia… or some new form of encryption… or differences in languages… or how someone who is blind engages with the Internet… or… or…

Or I’ll be inspired by a community network set up by an indigenous community or the amazing activities of Internet Society Chapters around the world. Just this week I was blown away by some powerful projects from this year’s group of Early Career Fellows (one of whom of course had me at “Wikipedia” and “multilingual”! 😀).

If you can surround yourself with passionate people who are smarter than you on some topics, it’s a beautiful thing for someone who likes to learn!

3 – The Ever-Changing Role

Third, my role keeps changing. When I began in 2011 it was for accelerating deployment of Internet protocols – and building a “hub” website for information users could use to help with that deployment. 15 years later, I am amusingly again building a web “hub”, but this time for online trust and safety resources! And I’m engaging with various technical communities and working on building a culture of accessibility within the organization.

In between 2011 and 2026, I’ve done MANY different things. For about 8 years I was in our communications team, leading the redesign of our website in 2017 and for a while being responsible for all the 25+ websites the organization operates. I was also involved in social media, content development, speeches, live-streaming, and many other comms-things – and for some time was very prolifically writing. Outside of communications, I led projects related to accelerating open standards, understanding low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites (like Starlink), supporting technical communities, and also routing security. I learned all about filing amicus briefs through supporting a project around that, and I spent multiple years documenting Internet shutdowns for our Pulse measurement platform.

And then in 2024 I changed to support our new President & CEO with her communications, which then evolved into creating a new role as her Chief of Staff in early 2025 – which was something completely new and interesting to learn! – and then evolving that role by the end of the year into something different for someone else. And then in 2026 I’ve taken on a new role focused around our online trust and safety work – and deepening our connection with several technical communities.

The point is that the Internet Society is a place where there are opportunities for those who wish to pursue them – and THAT is definitely what has kept me here over 15 years.

Succession Planning

As I’ve passed this milestone, one change I’ve noticed over the past couple of years – and that will continue to be a focus in the time ahead – has been my own orientation toward looking at how to help further develop the next generations of staff within the organization.

The reality is that next month I’ll turn 59 and just biologically there are only so many “working” years ahead of me. Maybe 10… maybe 15… maybe more… but maybe less, too. Bodies age, minds slow, medical issues arise, etc.

I think it’s incumbent upon all of us as we rise in seniority to figure out how we can ensure there are people in the pipeline who can carry on the work we’ve been doing – and even perhaps grow it even more and better beyond what we’ve done! 🎉 I’ve been lucky enough to have some great examples and mentors – and I need to be providing that to those who are coming up behind me.

So that has been – and will continue to be – something I’m increasingly focused on. I want to do all I can to help ensure the Internet Society, its community, and its ecosystem of organizations continues to grow and thrive over the many years ahead. Its voice and activities are needed now more than ever!

Next?

The reality is this 15-year anniversary is just another day… nothing changes on Monday when I go back online to work. I’m in the middle of focusing on delivering an online trust & safety website by the (rapidly approaching!) end of this month. I’m starting to do more writing and in fact should have a blog post dropping on Monday for an announcement. I’ve got some travel coming up to ICANN, IETF, and Marconi Society events. There’s emerging technology to continually monitor (ex. AI, LEOs, quantum). There’s email to read… Slack messages to go through… documents to update… and so much more.

And as I said at the beginning, the challenges to the open Internet that I outlined 15 years ago STILL PERSIST, and if anything have only gotten worse.

But the good news is that there are amazing people and communities around the world working on solutions and doing what they can to ensure the Internet is a force for good in the world.

It’s been an honor and privilege to be part of that for 15 years… and I’m looking forward to seeing where this all goes in the years ahead!

One Class In High School That Changed My Life – And I Almost Didn’t Take It

Old photo of a classroom of girls sitting at desks typing on typewriters. They girls are all wearing school uniforms and the walls are vary sparsely decorated.

It’s funny how decisions you may make in the moment can affect the course of your life.

It was the fall of 1984 and I was signing up for classes for my last semester at my high school in southern Connecticut. I had one open course slot and I had to sign up for some class. I’d completed all my required courses and could sign up for any course I wanted.

So after some deliberation, I signed up for “typing”. This made sense in my brain since I’d been playing with computers since 1977 when the first Apple II came out and one of my best friends got one. Later I got my own Commodore 64, and at the high school I helped out in the computer labs that were full of Apple IIe’s.

It seemed to me that typing might be something to learn. 🤔

BUT… this was 1984/1985 in a US high school. The only people who took “typing classes” were the girls who were expecting to become secretaries. 🤯 Looking back, it’s kind of fascinating now, but there was this clear gender divide. Typing was NOT a class that boys normally took at my school.

So there I was… in a room full of desks with IBM Selectric typewriters on them. The only boy. Me and 20+ girls sitting there typing jjjjjjjjjjjjj and fffffffff a zillion times until we could finally work our way up to such phrases as “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and go on from there. Typing and typing and typing for the five months or so of the semester. Typing so much that we could “touch type” and be able to be looking at something completely different while typing on our typewriters. Doing speed tests and accuracy tests and more.

In the perfect clarity of hindsight, it turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did!

I would go on to the University of New Hampshire where I got involved in the early Internet, as well as earlier networks like BITNET, EcoNet, etc. I would write millions of email messages, thousands and thousands of blog posts, a number of books, many reports and documents… and many, many lines of programming code in so many different languages.

I would go on to teach electronic publishing using Framemaker… and then develop courseware… and help people create web pages using HTML. Several of my jobs involved writing extensive sets of documentation, or later rapidly developing draft documents for Internet standards.

Because of that typing class, I was well-prepared for the USENET flamewars… for long debates on email lists… for being able to just spew out blog posts, press releases, speeches, or whatever else was needed.

Typing has been a critical component of the success I’ve had over the past 40 years… it turned out to be perhaps the single most useful class I took in high school!

And I almost didn’t… it was just tossed in at the last minute because I needed to fill a slot! 🤣

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons – History Trust of South Australia, circa 1945 – not my actual school.. I’m not THAT old! 😃

My Themes for 2026 – And Returning to Writing

A mind map on a gray background showing a white box with 2026 in the middle of it. On the right side are three lines going out of the box, with a word on each line. The first line is blue with the word "Health". The second line is orange with the word "Resilience". The third line is purple with the word "Hope".

Following a practice I’ve been doing for the past 17 years (see list), my first post of 2026 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year they are a re-ordered version of last year’s words: Health, Resilience, and Hope.

Health

This is my perennial theme… but I MUST make some changes this year and prioritize my health. I’m 14 pounds heavier than I was one year ago, and my blood pressure has been inching up more. If I want to be around long term, I’ve GOT to make some changes!

Resilience

As I talked about last year, “resilience” is a theme coming up in both my personal life and through the work I do at the Internet Society. Expect me to write more about this on various different levels.

Hope

As bleak or chaotic as things may be, I think we must choose hope “as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience”. There are people working on ideas and solutions for many challenges we have. There are people working to blunt the impact of extreme policies. We need to celebrate and support this work – and do more ourselves. That is MY continued goal for this year, as it was last year – to keep highlighting these hopeful stories, and to create some of my own as well.

These are my themes for 2026.. let’s see what happens!

A Note About My Writing

You’ll notice that I did NOT write any other posts on this DanYork.com site since last January. And if you look at my danyork.me aggregator site, you’ll see that I really didn’t write anywhere else, either!

For most of 2025, my role at the Internet Society was supporting our President and CEO, with first her communications and then since May 2025 as her Chief of Staff. The role was very intense and left me little time to do other writing – but even more so I was very aware of my close proximity to the CEO, and I didn’t want any of my writing to potentially reflect back on our CEO. I didn’t want anything I wrote personally to be viewed as potentially coming from our CEO or reflecting her views.

To minimize any potential confusion, I chose to go silent and not publish personal blog posts, podcast episodes, newsletters, or anything else. I was never asked to do this by our CEO or anyone else, and I don’t know if anyone there even noticed. I just felt it was best for me in my role.

That role is now changing as I go into 2026. I’m moving into a different role heading up a new project. We will be hiring a new Chief of Staff, and that person will be taking over the duties I had with our CEO. And so with all the changes, I feel that I can resume the writing and other content creation that I used to do. So you should see more writing from me in the months ahead!

My Themes for 2025

Following a practice I’ve been doing for the past 16 years (see list), my first post of 2025 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year they are: Resilience, Hope, and Health.

Resilience

Over the past year or so, and particularly over the past six months, it’s become increasingly clear to me that right now a focus for me needs to be around the general area of “resilience” on a number of different levels.

We’re in a time when extreme weather events ARE increasing – people are dying or being displaced by the thousands or millions. We’re in a time when extreme politics are increasing. We have a changing administration in the US, of course, but we’re seeing extreme governments come to power all around the world. Pick a continent… and there are changes happening there. New viruses are floating around (and the US looks to be poised to dramatically decrease our ability to respond).

There’s a lot of change going on – and a lot of uncertainty.

Of course, given my work, I’m interested in Internet resilience, something the Internet Society, my employer, is very focused on. But I’ve come to understand that Internet resilience depends upon electrical resilience, something I’ve written about at length. There’s also a need for resilience in our access to content, in our transportation, in our housing… and so much more.

And it’s not just at a personal level – we need community resilience. We need to strengthen our local connections, know more about our neighbors, build mutual aid networks, and generally help figure out how we can all get through all this.

I’m taking some actions in my own life, which I’ll write about on my sites. I’m planning to write a series of issues of my own “A View from the Crow’s Nest” newsletter on the theme of “building resilience” – you are welcome to subscribe! You can also expect this theme to come up in my writing and speaking for the Internet Society… and perhaps some other venues as well.

Hope

I do think that we’re in for some tough times in the months and years ahead. The politics can look bleak for many people… but even putting politics aside, the extreme weather events are effecting more of us. Reports on the state of the climate are dire.

It’s easy to “doomscroll” and get lost in despair.

As I wrote about last January 1, we can’t do that. As bleak or chaotic as things may be, I think we must choose hope “as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience”.

There are people working on ideas and solutions for many challenges we have. There are people working to blunt the impact of extreme policies. We need to celebrate and support this work – and do more ourselves.

That is MY goal for this year – to keep highlighting these hopeful stories, and to create some of my own as well.

Health

This is my perennial theme, but as I noted last year, I’ve had to make some changes in my life – and I need to continue those changes. The good news is that I’m making some positive gains: I’ve lost 23 pounds since last January 1, and my blood pressure is down closer to a normal level. Largely this is due to increasing daily exercise (walking 2-4 miles), lowering my sodium intake, and trying to make better food choices. I’ve still got some work to do… and I NEED to do it.

These are my themes for 2025.. let’s see how the year goes!

Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor

Today is a special anniversary for me. It was 20 years ago that I set up an account and first made an edit to Wikipedia! On that day I became a “Wikipedian”… although I’m not sure if that name was being used yet. Wikipedia had only been launched in January 2001, so it was a VERY different world in those days.

With the complete transparency of Wikipedia, I can of course go back and see what my earliest edits were. It’s fun to scroll down the list. Amusingly, my very first edit would be frowned upon today. I added the URL for my employer at the time, Mitel, to what was then a very sparse article with five paragraphs of text with no sources or references. (Compare that to today’s article for Mitel.) Today this would be considered a “COI edit” as I had a “conflict of interest” and per the “WP:COI guidelines” it would be recommended that I not make this edit directly (although it was just adding something factual in the form of a URL, so other editors may allow it).

But back in 2004, those were still the very early days when everyone was still trying to figure out what this Wikipedia thing was all about. The norms and conventions for things such as WP:COI hadn’t yet been developed.

The only other edit I made that first year was that same day when I first created my “user page” with one sentence linking to the other sites where I wrote. (How many people remember Advogato?😀) Twenty years later, that user page looks MUCH different!

Then in January 2005 I started creating and editing pages around Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and later in the year about.. Canadian food! 🤣 (We were living in Ottawa, Ontario, at that time.) And then a whole bunch of other pages, many of which are still in Wikipedia 20 years later, although substantially edited by others since that time.

After that, I didn’t really do a whole lot of editing. In the first 15 years (2004-2019) I made a grand total of 146 edits.

And then… came the COVID pandemic.

As one of the ways I dealt with my own mental health during that time, I started livestreaming Wikipedia editing to Twitch! 🤣 (Which I haven’t done lately, but will probably do tonight just to celebrate the anniversary.)

Every. Single. Day! For most of a year-and-a-half! 🤯

You can see this clearly in one of the tools available to see contributions from Wikipedia editors:

You can see there was even a year (2008) when I didn’t make a single edit, and one year (2012) where I made only one single edit.

And then… BOOM… 2020 hit and there I was!

What’s interesting about 2020 and 2021 is the salmon-colored block on the right. This was what is called a “template” and was where I was manually copying in the daily data from the Vermont Department of Health to update the chart that appears on the side of the article about the COVID-19 pandemic in Vermont. Every single day. Later in 2021 someone thankfully automated that so that it pulled the data direct from the Vermont Department of Health’s system, but for all that initial time it was a completely manual process – and was part of what I did each night on my Twitch livestream.

With that burst of activity during the pandemic, it caused me to dive deep into Wikipedia and learn about parts of the site and community that I had never really engaged with, and that in many cases hadn’t even been around in the earlier days when I first got involved. I learned a huge amount.

And out of that I became endlessly fascinated with how the whole Wikipedia community – and broader Wikimedia movement – has evolved, and I continue that fascination today. As you can see from the chart, I’m continuing to edit in 2024 and plan to keep on going.

In fact, I’m seriously thinking about bringing back the livestreaming. (Follow me on Twitch to be notified or over on Mastodon where I’ll post if I’m streaming.)

Wikipedia has definitely changed a huge amount over time, from being a site that was initially dismissed and derided, to today being one of the sites where you can go for well-sourced information. Sure, it definitely has its quirks and problems, but overall I believe it’s definitely a positive force in these times when we are so challenged for good information.

Given all the changes that are happening with the way we find and consume information (thinking of generative AI in particular), it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia evolves over the next 20 years!

Meanwhile, there are articles to edit and users to welcome… 😀🎉

An companion podcast episode is available at:

DanYork · TDYR-416-20-years-of-Wikipedia-editing

Should I Stay (In) or Go (Out) Now? The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma

The Vermont Eclipse Dilemma: do we leave our houses and go out and enjoy all the eclipse-related festivities? Or do we just stay at home and leave all the events to the 534,873,937 people that are expected to arrive here to visit? (Not the actual number, but that’s what it feels like according to the media articles!🤣)

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a solar eclipse happening on this coming Monday, April 8, 2024. And we here in northwestern Vermont are right in the path of “totality”. For about 3 minutes on Monday afternoon, the moon will completely block the sun. It’s supposed to be amazing by those who have seen it!

And … ABC News and other sources have declared the Burlington, VT, area to be THE best place in the USA to view the eclipse! 😲🤯😱

Now, the “path of totality” stretches from western Mexico up through Texas, Ohio, and on up through northern New York (including Niagra Falls), northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and then through Maine into New Brunswick and maritime Canada.

Everywhere along that path, hotel and AirBnB rooms sold out months ago. You can’t book any rooms unless you want to pay obscene amounts of money. Events are sold out. Everything’s sold out! People have been planning trips for years, in some cases. And with all the media attention, so many people are expected to drive to the path of totality on Monday.

Here’s the thing… we here in Vermont were expecting to see some visitors, but in early April it’s usually cloudy and rainy. The early predictions were for all of that. If you really wanted to see the eclipse, the smart approach was to head to Texas where the chances of sun were SIGNIFICANTLY higher!

Still, we have prepared. Our schools are closed on Monday. Many businesses have encouraged people who can work remotely to do so. Everyone has been encouraged to do all their grocery shopping before the weekend. Big signs on the highways are telling everyone to STAY HOME if at all possible!

You see, we’re a rural state. We only have around 646,000 people in total. And about 150,000 of those people live up in the northwest corner when I live. We have only two Interstate highways: I-91 running up the east side, and I-89 going diagonally northwest across the top half of the state.

Outside of those two interstates, almost all of our other roads are your regular old two lane roads (one going one direction, one going the other). Sure, we sometimes might have sections with two lanes on both sides. Sometimes we’ll throw in a passing lane or a turning lane in the middle. We might even have small stretches of divided highway.

But most of our roads are small. We don’t need them to be huge.

And so… what happens when 10s of thousands – or maybe 100s of thousands! – of people come up to visit? On roads that are really more for hundreds of people? (If that!)

Yeah… that’s why we closed our schools and told everyone to stay home!

And of course, with the weather being as unpredictable as it is, current forecasts for Texas are that it will be CLOUDY on Monday! 🤦‍♂️

And we… are expected to have bright, sunny, clear skies! 🤯

Hence the news from ABC and other places that Vermont is the place to be!

Add to this the fact that we’re only a few hours drive for people down in Massachusetts and even Pennsylvania and New York… there truly are 100s of thousands of people who could make the drive.

So we’re ready… we have so many different events planned. Restaurants that usually are closed on Monday are all opening up. Massive events are planned for the Burlington waterfront, the airport, and in so many other places. We’ll welcome you all up here warmly!

But for Vermonters we do have the dilemma… do we actually go out and join in any of the festivities? Or do we leave those for the visitors … and just watch the eclipse from our yards?

Either way… we’ve got our eclipse glasses and we’re excited to experience this once-in-a-lifetime event!

Bring it on!

P.S. Good luck to all the visitors trying to get home on Monday after the eclipse… did I mention about our small roads and only two Interstate highways? Have you considered staying until Tuesday? 😀

I’m Doing It Again… Getting Sucked Into Consuming Vs Creating

I’m doing it again… instead of writing and creating new posts in the morning, I’m sitting there scrolling through Mastodon… or reading the latest news on Memeorandum or Techmeme… or jumping into work email or Slack before I really need to. And sooner or later, any of the “free” time I had is gone and it’s time to start the work day. The time has melted away.

Consumption has triumphed over creation, yet again.

That’s no way to get back into writing more. That’s no way to develop habits of consistent writing.

And yet it is so incredibly easy to fall into that pattern… again and again and again….

So today I’ll write this small post of self-reflection to start yet again. Here’s to yet another attempt to break that pattern and build newer, stronger habits!

——

Image credit: a generated image from Leonardo.ai

A New Plan For Getting in the Habit of Consistently Publishing Podcasts and Newsletters

In thinking about my themes for 2024 and specifically about changing my habits, one change that I am going to try is to get consistent with both my “The Dan York Report” podcast and also my “A View From The Crow’s Nest” newsletter.

Right now they are both “irregular” or “periodic”… meaning I just do them whenever I think about them or have some reason for doing them. Which means that sometimes I publish 4 of them in a week… and then I don’t publish anything for four weeks or more! 🤦‍♂️

I want to get in the *habit* of doing both. I want to instill in myself the discipline of regular production.

And I also want to be realistic by planning a weekly production. Sometimes in the past I have tried to “get back into producing content” and targeted daily production. But that’s not realistic for me with everything else going on in life.

We’ll see. Weekly may turn out to be too much. Perhaps I will shoot for every other week.

My logic for the podcast being on Mondays is that it gives me time on the weekend to do the production. My logic for the newsletter on Fridays is that sometimes I write about stuff that people might want to experiment with over a weekend – or I have links to other longer reads or items that may take more time than people have in a typical week day.

There’s also a symbiosis where either the Friday newsletter can feed into the Monday podcast… or vice versa where the Monday podcast becomes the topic for the Friday newsletter.

Another aspect is that by limiting myself to weekly, I’m hoping to plan ahead and produce both newsletters and podcasts in advance! (Wild concept for me!!)

Which isn’t to say that I won’t also put out a podcast or newsletter at another time when something interesting or breaking news makes me want to publish a new edition. But I want to get to a consistent cadence.

Again… we’ll see! It’s all a grand experiment. Stay tuned… if I actually execute on this I’ll drop a podcast episode tomorrow…. 🙂

Crossing the 45th Parallel in Northern Vermont

From the Burlington, Vermont area, it’s only about a 45 minute drive to the Canadian border. (Yes, we are *that*close!🙂) As you get close to the border on Interstate 89, there is a sign on the right side that says:

Latitude 45° North
Midpoint
Equator to
North Pole

Yes, indeed, once you drive past that point you are now getting closer to the North Pole than the Equator from a latitude perspective!

Wikipedia of course has some interesting info about the 45th parallel, including that it has formed part of the US / Canada border at times.

In fact, when we lived in Ottawa, Ontario, for five years from 2000-2005, I maintained a blog called “North of 45” about our experience living there. (Sadly now all filled with ads because of the decline of LiveJournal.)

These days, we mostly drive north of the 45th to either: 1) go curling just over the border in Bedford, Quebec; 2) go to the Montreal airport (YUL) to fly somewhere; or 3) go to our closest IKEA in Boucherville, Quebec, just to the east of Montreal. 😀

I just smile whenever I see the sign. We are definitely in the northern part of the northern hemisphere!

My Themes for 2024

As I have been doing for the past 15 years (see list), my first post of 2024 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year I decided on 3 H’s: Hope, Health, and Habits.

Hope

We live in challenging times… and 2024 looks to present even greater challenges. A colleague of mine noted that there will be over 100 elections in 67 countries in 2024 – all of which will undoubtedly create communication and societal challenges in this time of great polarization. I expect great amounts of mis/disinformation, especially in this era of “generative AI”. With the climate, we’re just coming off the hottest year in recorded history, and signs are that 2024 could be even worse. Economic inequality keeps rising. Fewer and fewer people can afford to buy houses around where I live. We have a dictator who wants to be our next US President (and some % of people seem ready to vote for him 🤯). There’s a lot of gloom out there.

And yet… as the good folks at FutureCrunch remind us – there are a lot of good things going on: “66 Good News Stories You Didn’t Hear About in 2023”. The challenge is that all of that gets drowned out in the media’s desire to get eyeballs. (“If it bleeds, it leads!”)

A couple of years ago I wrote this (re-shared on Mastodon last year):

The challenge that lies before us is more than choosing hope over fear.

It is choosing hope *amidst* the overwhelming narratives of fear and doom.

It is choosing hope and optimism *despite* those fears.

It is choosing hope as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience.

I believe that is truly our calling.

Last year, as I was preparing to become President of our local Rotary Club in July 2023, I was thrilled to find that the “theme” for this year’s Rotary International president is “Create Hope in the World”. That resonates so strongly with me.

Now, more than ever, with so much chaos around us, we need to provide whatever small shreds of hope we can.

Health

Health (or a health-related word) has been one of my three words in 12 of these 15 years, including last year. This year I had some tests done and some checkups, and while I’m okay overall, my bad cholesterol levels are too high, my blood pressure is creeping toward a point where I need to be concerned, and I’m at the heaviest weight I’ve ever been. Addressing this MUST be a focus, or I won’t be here to write the 2025 version. 🙁

Habits

In 2023, I spent some time looking at how I spend my time, and some of the habits I have. Some of those are good (ex. daily language practice), but others need to change, such as being far too sedentary… or doomscrolling through social media instead of creating content. In 2024, I want to change and form some healthier habits… for my actual health, but also just for how I interact in the world. One of these I’ve already started is to rejuvenate my email newsletter (all are welcome to subscribe!) and to start writing there versus on social media.

To that point, I really want to focus on the POSSE model of publishing on my own sites first, and THEN sharing it out on social channels. Too much of what I’ve been writing lately has been on other people’s platforms. I want to form the strong habit of writing on my own sites first.

Interestingly, Om Malik recently wrote about his own desire to return to blogging, specifically to use his blog as more of a “commonplace journal”. I like that framing. Stay tuned to see if I actually do it!

I’m also hoping that the habit I’ve started in 2023 of doing a bit more with music continues. I’m trying to carve out time each day to noodle a bit with the piano or guitar. I want to see about doing even more.

The challenge, of course, will be to excise some of the not-so-good habits that have formed in my life. It will be an interesting year!

That’s what I’m looking forward to this year. How about you?