I’ve been working on my New Year’s resolutions for 2013 and treating the list as a strategic plan. As such, there are three higher level elements that make up the plan: goals (objectives), strategies (ways to achieve objectives), and action steps (execution and tactics that fulfill strategies). Most resolution lists I see involve the detailing of action steps rather than the strategies and goals to which those steps relate. For instance, a poet might say they want to publish twelve poems in 2013. That’s an action step which supports a strategy, which in turn supports a goal — both of which have remained unnamed.

For my list, I tried to remain at the goal level, because strategies and action steps flow from goals, but a person can get very lost — very confused about goals — when listing action steps and strategies without determining the overall goal each item relates to. This is a new list, and I am still refining it. It’s quite likely that I’ve lapsed into strategies at times, since goals and strategies are often difficult for me to delineate. I suspect some of my goals will be reframed as strategies and that new goals will emerge as I sit with this list over the coming weeks and months.

It’s important to note that I’ve left out a critical element by starting with goals, one that ties all the goals together: mission. Goals are not the end in themselves but instead support a larger mission, which is the ultimate state, condition or aspiration. I think New Year’s resolutions would be better served if we sat down and thought about what we are ultimately aspiring to in our lives — that is, if we came up with a personal mission statement. But that’s a scary thing to do and calls for us to reveal something quite intimate about ourselves. It’s much easier to remain tacit about our mission and hope people can determine what that mission might be by reading our cobbled together list of action items.

The question we might ask when trying to determine our personal mission statements is: What is the overarching framework for what we are ultimately hoping to do during our lifetimes?

In my case, I suppose the mission is to live an engaged life, on every level. I want to be personally engaged, creatively engaged, intellectually engaged, emotionally engaged, and socially engaged. Toward that end, here is my list of New Year’s resolutions for 2013, as it currently stands:

1. I will ask the questions I need to ask and seek the answers I need to seek in order to deepen my understanding of the world and my place in it.
2. I will cultivate living with both an open heart and an open mind, which will allow me to greet new challenges as they present themselves and to deal with them as such, as opposed to reacting in a habituated way that has no bearing on the present situation.
3. I will accept and live up to what agrees with my heart and mind and is conducive to the good and benefit of all.
4. I will remember that, no matter how much I perceive I suffer, the suffering of the world is greater than my own. My personal suffering serves to remind me that others suffer as well, and that I am capable of helping to alleviate that suffering, both in ways I recognize and in ways I do not recognize.
5. I will not allow cynicism and its accompanying mindsets to convince me I should give up on myself, others or the world itself.
6. I will connect in whatever ways I can with others — through shared play, passion and purpose.
7. I will spend part of each day in silence. I will cultivate mindful writing, speech and action each day.
8. I will read: especially poetry, because I see poetry as prayer, as connective tissue — as exploration, postulation, deep meditation. I see poetry as capable of crossing all bounds of time and space in order to bring us back to ourselves and one another.
9. I will listen: to adults and children, to those like me and those unlike me, to the sounds of all living creatures and to the sounds of the earth we all share.
10. I will treat each day, in Denise Levertov’s words, as a presence — “a sky, air, light: / a being.” For each day I live through, love and suffer through, I will give thanks.