The Zen Habits blog (in connection with the guy’s book that just came out) is sponsoring a New Year’s Challenge, in which people sign up to work on forming a new habit by spending just 10 minutes a day on something, for 30 days.

I like the 10 minute time limit (everyone has 10 minutes, right?) and the 30 day endpoint. It feels doable, yet with the potential to alter patterns or raise awareness about the ways we sabotage ourselves. The trouble is, the changes I want to make mostly involve stopping doing something. What would I do for 10 minutes a day that would help me stop checking e-mail and facebook so often? That’s an interesting question. Maybe that’ll be February’s focus.

But this month, as cliche as it is, I’m all about the personal fitness thing. I basically gave myself a pass while J was young and/or nursing. He’s still pretty young, but I’m no longer attached to him for significant portions of the day, so… it’s time to take some baby steps. I resumed the workout a few months ago, sporadic though I may be.

So for this New Year’s Challenge I’m going to try something that sounds counterintuitive as a fitness goal. I’m going to spend that 10 minutes eating… specifically, a daily dessert/chocolate. The rules are:

1. It is the only sweet of the day. (I will make an exception for my birthday) Amazingly, consuming a single sweet every day will be a significant cutback for me, especially after the holidays.

2. This will usually be something small, like a piece of Dove chocolate.

3. I will do nothing else while eating it. My habit is to snack on the run, grab a handful of M&Ms from the work room at church, munch a cookie while doing the dishes, and so forth. The goal in this experiment will be to eat mindfully for just 10 minutes a day, to enjoy a bit of personal sabbath time. I think I’ll do this right after the kids are in bed, before it gets too late.
I will put down the book and the computer, breathe, eat slowly, and be quiet.

R and I are pretty serious foodies, which is a sad state of affairs given our kids’ ages and stages of development. M and J are pretty willing eaters but it seems like every day brings a new announcement from C that a food she liked yesterday no longer passes muster. (For the record, we do not cater to her, and we try not to make a big deal out of it. It feels developmental, and even if it’s not, what can we do about it? Those “you need to eat three bites of this, then take a bite of that, then you can have your dessert” parents just make my teeth itch… no offense if you’re one of those parents. Your mileage may vary.)

I waver between two viewpoints about food: on the one hand, food is something to be savored and eaten mindfully. It is one of the wonderful pleasures of life. I think one of our food dysfunctions in this country is multitasking our eating, not being intentional about going slow, not thinking about what goes in our mouth. On the other hand, food is fuel. That’s it. There’s nothing magical about it. Sometimes your car just needs gas, and it doesn’t need to be this major production. But there’s no reason to eat treats with the same perfunctory attitude with which one fuels up, because sweets aren’t good fuel.

So… 10 minutes of chocolate.

The accountability will be to blog about it, maybe not everyday, but hopefully often enough throughout the next month to glean some useful information, even if that information is “this was a dumb idea.”

I do like the idea of New Year’s resolutions. I like calling them intentions, as I’ve written here before. We all need a fresh start now and then.

And with that, here once again is my traditional New Year’s blessing:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
He replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than the known way.”
–John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress