New deal breakers for a new year

This blog has tended to state how things are rather than what they can be. I tend to wax complainingly rhapsodic about the increasing amount of paperwork in education, overwrought society, overwrought weddings, fabulous organists who don’t know how to behave in public, and churches removing Christ from Christmas by canceling church when Christmas Day falls on Sunday. But how to move on from the point of calling it what it is into starting to make it what it can be? I suppose I can only start with myself.

I have two stacks of books I want to read -- one in my house, the other in my office. In the office, I resolve to devote at least an hour each day to reading. Reading about Duruflé, Sweelinck, research methods for Felix Mendelssohn’s slurrings, the complete works (or so it seems) of Robert Donington, and about the perennial question of pronouncing that pedal stop name “off-ih-clyde” or “off-ih-slayd.” In the stack of books at home are the Iliad and the Odyssey, books on North Carolina architecture, and self-help books by Harville Hendrix and Elizabeth Gilbert.

I also need to swim every day. Jog every 3 days. Stretch every day. Practicing every day might be nice, too. And I just might want to throw in writing every day. That’s a soul feeder and should therefore be a deal breaker. Writing student textbooks, blog posts, and that zombie novel I have been pondering.