It’s an ill wind that blows no good. At least, that’s what I told myself when the Covid lockdown began in 2020, and that I reiterated when 2021 arrived with a resumption of limited social interactions. I’m solitary by nature, and this was a golden opportunity, I told myself, to get things done. To write more. To be productive. I entered 2021 with wildly ambitious goals, and then came up against what a lot of creative folks found: you may have the time, but constant low-level anxiety just doesn’t mix well with productivity.

I didn’t get to all of the things on my 2021 list. Hell, I didn’t get to half of the things on my 2021 list. And as I’ve begun to contemplate 2022, there’s a terrible temptation to carry the old ones forward and add new ones. This past year I didn’t get to Goal A and Goal B, so this year I’ll first accomplish last year’s Goal A and Goal B before carrying out the new and improved 2022 Goal A and Goal B. Whew!

Not a wise conclusion.

I think the word we all need to hold in our minds this new year is balance. Of course there are things we want to achieve. Of course there are regrets about not completing some of our cherished plans. But we don’t live in the same world we lived in two years ago, and a different world calls for different strategies.

When I’m tempted to berate myself for not doing everything I’d planned, I remember a phrase out of a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to a friend. “Am in sort of a better époque of working now,” he says, “and just remembered that I always work well in the Spring.”

There’s a tinge of regret in that sentence about not working as well as he’d hoped in the past, but it’s clear that he is looking forward with gentleness and acceptance to a more productive future. Hemingway was confident his work would get done by accepting past disappointment and knowing punitive self-judgments were unlikely to get his book written any faster or better.

In other words, he found some balance between expectations and reality, and made a plan to live in that balance, knowing he always worked best in the spring.

Finding that spring—wherever and whenever it is for each of us—is what will enable us to move forward into a year that carries more unknowns than knowns. Making plans and creating goals that take the world around us, and our subsequent feelings and reactions, into account. Removing the assumptions and the “should” from our to-do lists. And being grateful for what we are able to accomplish rather than bemoaning that which we cannot.

Keep 2022’s resolutions modest. Achievable. Gentle, even. No more wildly ambitious monthly targets. No more hanging our self-esteem and professional pride on achievements in a year when it will be an achievement to survive.

That’s Hemingway’s “better époque.” It can be yours, too.