New Year’s Principles
By: Santos Torres Iii
Tags: Creativity, Music, Writing, Charity, Wellness

Create, Learn, Move, Rest & Give Back.

https://storres3rd.com/new-years-principles

2020 has been an incredibly challenging year, but with the vaccine for coronavirus on the horizon, I find myself waking each day with a little more optimism and renewed creativity. Before the New Year, I usually commit to picking up a new project or learning a new skill. In the coming year, I intend to instead employ key principles I’ve found extremely useful in surviving the great dumpster fire this past year has been.

It has certainly been my least creatively productive year so far: pandemic aside, my family has been simultaneously managing my mother’s ongoing battle with multiple myeloma — an incurable blood cancer (that has the super-fun bonus of triggering schizophrenic episodes for her). I’ve moved twice in the last year and started a new job as well, so there was little time to actively create — but certainly no shortage of opportunity for personal development.

With the help of family, loved ones, the community I’ve found from creating music, and experimentation with almost every stress management strategy yet known to man — I can honestly say I’m coming out of this year a stronger person. Heading into the New Year, here are some of the principles I’ll be committing to practice in 2021:

Create More:

In the past year, I’ve had to almost entirely step away from music production. The separation anxiety was very real early on, but it’s had the upside of forcing me to prioritize and re-evaluate my spending of creative energy.

Until now, all of that creative energy was spent in one spot — creating music, or improving that specific craft. My younger self could better sustain an extreme level of dedication, even in the face of deteriorating mental and physical health. Having joined the thirties club in 2020, that approach no longer seems rational, beneficial, or even feasible.

I intend to take a more holistic approach to creativity in 2021, not only via healthier habits but engaging in more creative pursuits overall. This blog is one example — writing has always been of interest to me but outside of a short stint in freelancing, I never consistently wrote. If given the choice to spend time making music versus writing, the latter would always be in second place.

At a time when it’s easy to fall into constant passive consumption of content, this feels like the most important principle on my list. I hope to take a more active role in creating and curating. Instead of staying in one lane, I will explore more creative outlets and diversify my creative energy expenditure in the New Year.

Learn More:

My learning after graduating from college has been one dimensional in much the same way my creativity was, and in 2021, I’ll be challenging myself to learn more — especially in areas I’ve not been comfortable with. I was never inclined to learn mathematics, for example, always doing the bare minimum to get by in classes. The thought of actually learning math at a higher level raises my heart rate and makes my palms sweat, so this feels like a decent starting point.

There are things I’ve intended to learn that are less intimidating and naturally synergistic with other areas of my life — learning piano and programming sit at the top of that somewhat lengthy list for the New Year. I would like to take the same holistic approach in learning as creating though and will be broadening my areas of interest.

Move More

With gyms partially closed and my apartment stocked with fitness equipment, the idea of cramming daily lifting and cardio sessions while investing more time in creating and learning seems unnecessarily difficult. Although my physique isn’t exactly representative of it, I’ve been a gym rat for most of my life — it only took a global pandemic for me to see the benefits of working out at home.

I do miss heavier lifting but find myself in better cardiovascular fitness than I’ve ever been, mostly due to consistency. I’ve broken up with powerlifting for new lovers in running, biking, HIIT sessions, and circuit-style training. Exercise mimetics like saunas, cold showers, and cryotherapy have also made their way into my weekly routine, while hiking and camping trips will be in the quarterly and bi-yearly rotation for 2021.

My fitness routine fell victim to the same pitfalls as my creative approach. It’s refreshing to be pushed outside my comfort zone, and as this happens repeatedly it creates a positive feedback loop where I find myself more open to new experiences, practices, and strategies in all areas of life.

Rest More

Any creative knows the incredible feeling of pressure to constantly be doing something, anything, at all times, and most of us have burnt the candle at both ends for long periods. It can yield results in the short term, but the long term mental and physical health implications of the constant creative grind are disastrous.

Musicians, dependent on gigs and touring as the main source of income before lockdowns were put in place, are especially prone to poor lifestyle habits and sleep hygiene. While most of us are still struggling to find new and sustainable methods of generating revenue, we can all agree the coronavirus pandemic has given us the chance to take a much-needed breather and find our new, healthier rhythms.

One of the most effective stress management strategies I’ve come to depend on in this past year is maintaining a consistent sleep schedule and creating healthier habits that improve the overall quality of sleep. Daily exercise, limiting late-night screen time, eating earlier, and reducing alcohol and caffeine intake are all beneficial practices all too easily neglected in the name of short-term productivity.

The trade-off from sacrificing rest to create more is inevitable burnout, whereas smarter resting pays off compound interest in productivity over the long term. Sleep hygiene, mindfulness practice, breathing exercises, and yoga have become central to my daily life, giving me the energy needed to sustain myself better and pursue more creative endeavors in turn.

Give Back

The final and actually most important of my New Year’s principles is giving back in every way that I can. I started my current day job before the pandemic, and my work on a day to day basis has me traveling all over New York City: I work for a funeral service as part of their international shipping team, helping families coordinate between funeral homes and consulates from their home countries to make arrangements for their loved ones.

As the pandemic worsened and lockdowns were in place, my workload increased exponentially but day to day operations did not change much at all — and taking public transportation every day while most everyone I knew was working from home, I witnessed the city rapidly transition through many different stages and extremes.

The evolution of New York through the coronavirus pandemic was unreal, unforgettable, eye-opening; incredibly inspiring, and simultaneously deeply disheartening. I saw and was able to travel freely around the city that never sleeps as it was locked down, and watched it become the city that was eerily empty.

Walking through an empty and silent time square, being the only person in a subway train, witnessing the city come to life during the Black Lives Matter protests, seeing local businesses struggle to adapt with little or no help or guidance from the state and federal government, experiencing the monumental failures of our healthcare system and governing bodies… I could write at length about this experience and may do so at some point, but it’s difficult to even find the words — let alone string them together in a coherent fashion.

I wouldn’t have traded my work or first-person experience for anything else, it was deeply profound and gave me a new and more meaningful perspective. Seeing first hand the incompetence of our infrastructure and exponential rise in homeless, hungry, and ill in the seemingly prosperous New York City area has made me realize that we are failing as a society to provide people in our back yard with basic human necessities; our systems are failing us — and not enough of us are taking individual action.

In 2021 and on, I will be committing to giving back in as many ways as I can. I will be pledging a percentage of my income through the rest of my lifetime to charity via Giving What We Can. After researching the most effective charitable organizations, I found the Effective Altruism movement whose ethos resonates deeply with me — and I strongly encourage you to explore these organizations yourself and consider donating in the same manner.

I will employ this mentality in all of my current and future professional endeavors as well and am exploring ways to give back to charities and local communities with my creative ventures in the New Year.

This summarizes my mentality heading into 2021, and if you’ve read this far, I sincerely appreciate your time. I will be using this blog as an outlet for various areas of interest to me: music, nutrition, physical and mental health awareness, charity, and creativity are some of the topics you will find me rambling about here or over at Twitter if you would like to keep up.

Wishing you happy holidays and health in the New Year,

Santos Torres III