See More Live In '25

it rhymes, so it must be a good plan?

How are we doing on our hopes, goals, and intentions for 2025? I enjoy letting the general buzz of other people’s fresh-start optimism waft around me during the month of January, but I don’t usually set specific goals for the new year. Sometimes the natural recalibration of habits and routines that happens after the holidays is enough to set me on some small, sensible path toward living well, and I sort of accidentally stumble into a lifestyle change (leaving Instagram happened this way), but I generally avoid setting down specific, forward-looking goals.

What works well for me instead is to track the habits (or the behaviors, or the books, or the events) that make a difference in my life. I track in a bullet journal¹, where I also maintain an analog monthly and weekly planner and a line-a-day gratitude practice. I started a few years ago by tracking the books I read and the shows and movies I watched, for no other reason than I found it frustrating to draw such enormous blanks every time someone asked if I’d read or watched anything great lately. Each year I’ve evolved the practice, and now find it really satisfying to look back at what is essentially ‘data’, but feels much richer and more telling than that.

The blue-outlined boxes on the edges of the spread are where I track things like books I read, shows I watch, live events I attend, and workouts I suffer through.

Last year I added a box on my two-page monthly spread that I labeled LIVE!. After a particularly culture-rich 2023 where I got to see more concerts, Broadway musicals, stand-up comedy, professionally-staged Shakespeare, and teen theatre productions than I had seen in the previous three years combined, it occurred to me that my life is better when I’m seeing live performance. Full stop.

So I made a point to write down every time my butt was in a seat and someone else was up on a stage, including a really broad range of events in my definition of live performance. 5th grade chorus concert? Obviously counts. Hearing an author speak at a free local school event? She talked and I clapped; it counts. Panel discussion after a documentary screening? Definitely. Attending a college basketball game? Sure. I was proving out my hunch that, especially after the pandemic years, I get a well-being boost almost every time I gather collectively with fellow humans to witness or watch other fellow-humans do something.

(It’s also worth noting here that I naturally tend toward homebody behaviors, I’m quite frugal, and I go to bed early - all of which make me less likely to say yes to too many live events, and more in need of the motivational nudge provided by tracking.

Meagan Francis

I have talked often on The Mom Hour about our opposite tendencies in this area, and how she has benefitted from learning how to stay in more and go out less. Maybe tracking helps most in areas where we need that nudge.)

At the end of 2024 I consolidated my monthly tracking into summaries like this. Also, counting a nature walk as a live event feels like a stretch EXCEPT that our tour guide was so fantastic it was like attending a 2.5-hour botany/history lecture.

In 2024 I averaged 2-3 live events per month; three months had only one event written down, but several had four or more (and no month went eventless!). Most were free or very inexpensive, so these weren’t arena concerts or Broadway shows, though I will add that I’ve thought a lot about what feels ‘worth it’ to me when it comes to spending money, and live performance and travel experiences are two things that top my list.

Where goal-setting looks forward onto a blank slate of possibility, habit-tracking allows me to look backward at the choices I’ve made and, weirdly, that’s more motivating to me when I do think about the future. I can reflect back on the month, or the year, or the past several years, and see the accumulated evidence of a life lived according to my personal values … or not. And then adjust from there.

January’s end is upon us, and I’ve attended four live events this month. One was a business event where I got to see my dad speak on a panel; one was a touring production of Mean Girls the musical; one was a stand-up comedy show. The last one was this past weekend, when Meagan and I popped into a free Garth Brooks tribute band concert that was happening in the hotel we were staying in in Grapevine, TX. We wandered in on our way back from dinner and intended to stay only as long as the spirit moved us … which wound up being through the final encore. (One guess as to that encore song. You are correct.)

There’s so much I could say about how surprisingly joyful a cover band is, about how much Meagan and I loved the babyfaced Garth impersonator, about how vitally important live musicians are to a functioning society, and about how a midlife lady Saturday night includes responsibly choosing N/A beer once the clock strikes 8:30pm - even when none of you has to drive - but this is getting awfully long. I’ll leave you with this thought: it’s hard to feel shitty about the state of the world when you’re singing along to music with a hundred strangers and a bestest friend.

fake beer + fake Garth = real fun

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Are you tracking anything in 2025? Would you like to start? It’s not too late to look back at January and take note of your favorite meals, the number of times you called your grandma, or the podcast episodes that made you think. If goal-setting isn’t in the cards for you this year, maybe give it a try!

1. There are tons of apps for tracking everything, but doing it on paper has been more fun and useful for me. Generally, I’m 90% digital-everything, 10% putting my fine-liner pens in rainbow order. We contain multitudes, don’t we?