When I was in London for a few days with my son Orion after the 2016 Keswick Mountain Festival, we stopped in at the Charing Cross Road Foyle’s Books and its overwhelming kilometers of shelves. As much as I wanted half the books in the store, we agreed to limit ourselves to one book each.

My choice was The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything, by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh. I don’t typically opt for books in the ‘self-help’ category, but this one caught my attention partly because of its attention to the idea of small, daily rituals — those things we may believe are inconsequential, pointless, or irrelevant.

Drawing on Chinese philosophers from Confucius and Mencius to Laozi and Zhuangzi and others, The Path points out that we do not need “a radical new plan for how to live and how to organize the world,” but rather, we should pay far greater attention to the “mundane aspects of daily life” and that “we create the Way anew every moment of our lives.”

It can be easy for me to lose sight of the essential role our daily routines play in helping reach long-term goals; sometimes the mundanity of the quotidian even seems to get in the way of what I want to do in the long run.

Simply making a long-term goal isn’t enough. It’s the thousands of tiny steps between here and there — the daily rituals — that can make nearly any goal attainable.

January 1st is just around the corner, and with it, an opportunity to reframe, reground, and reassess both what we plan for and what we do every day. This year, I meet the start of the new year with a renewed drive and passion for Climate Run projects, and, honestly, more than a little anxiety.

In 2018, the 4th year of Climate Run, I have my sights set on two adventures:

First, in late June, I will get on a bike at the Vermont / Canadian border and ride, non-stop, the 200 or so miles to the southern end of the Long Trail on the Massachusetts state line, and then run back up to Canada — effectively completing a round-trip of nearly 500 miles in about 10 days.

I’m stoked to bring Climate Run to Vermont and share not only stories of the experience, but also the ride and run themselves with others. Do you want to join me for a day? for a few miles? at a road crossing? Let me know! It’s been great to have the support of so many over the past 3 years, and it will be even better to see you all out on the roads and trails of Vermont!

Second, I will be headed back to Scandinavia where, just before teaching a field course in northern Norway with Sterling College, I will spend a few days in the Faroe Islands. There, in late July, and with fingers crossed for reasonable weather, I plan to summit the highest peaks on 7 of the archipelago’s islands (each over 700 meters in elevation) in a single long day — a total of more than 50 km of running and nearly 16,000 ft of elevation gain.

Super exciting to think about (& many more details to come soon!) — but knowing the work I need to do every single day to be able to reach these goals is terrifying.

My hope is that I can keep these huge goals in mind while really keeping a steadfast focus on the daily work — the rituals — they require…and through that work to collect and share stories of the many, many steps along the way.