Last month was NaBloPoMo, which sounds a bit like a kind of baby food, maybe with squash in it. I wrote a post every day for a month, which I also did last February. Writing every day is a bit like doing any other kind of exercise – hard at first, but then it feels really good. Alas, writing a post a day did not make me skinnier or define my abs in any noticeable fashion.

November ended with a blustery storm and I’ve not posted in a few days (I know, your world has no meaning as a result of my dereliction. Sorry).  Then I noticed a few people doing this “Reverb 10” thing and I got curious. It’s another post-a-day thing, with the intention of reflecting on the year that’s passed and articulating goals for the year to come.

There are big changes brewing in 2011–moving out of this apartment, one kid starting middle school, Husband turns 50, maybe moving out of the city–and that’s just the stuff I know about.  Seems like reflecting and articulating might not be a bad thing to do–and writing about it is a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy.

I’ve missed the first three days…but here are the prompts and responses:

Dec 1: 2010 in one word, and explain. And then what would the word be for 2011?

2010:  Tension. Moving too fast, doing too many things, going in too many directions at once. I realize that this description just about sums up the lives of any working person who lives in New York, but sitting here right now, I think Husband and I have spent most of 2010 scrambling to make sure that not too much stuff falls off the edges of our very full plates.  So that means I’d like 2011 to be the opposite of tense. Calmer? Slower? Centered? Any of those would be good.

Dec 2: What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing and what can you do to eliminate it? Ha! Eliminate that which doesn’t contribute to my writing? Gosh, is it part of this reverb project that I can abandon my family? Get a room of my own and all that? Or hey, what about that day job? Reading student papers really gets in the way of my writing. Ditto laundry, housecleaning, and miscellaneous meal preparation.

Dec 3: Pick a moment when you have felt most alive this year… Walking in the desert outside Qasr Al Sarab, along the ridge of a dune. The side of the ridge in the sun was so hot it burned my feet; the other side was deliciously cool.

Reverb…maybe the idea of doing this sort of writing is to find the good stuff in the year that’s sliding to a close and find ways to let that good stuff reverberate into the new year.

Hmm.