The Bingo Card Check-In: Mid-February 2026

In the last week of December, I found a Bingo card template in Canva and added a Kurt Vonnegut quote to the bottom: “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” 

I duplicated the file, added The Smile Project logo to the top of the second Bingo card, and replaced Kurt Vonnegut with Earl Nightingale: “Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”

With 50 blank squares across two boards before me, I sat down and wrote goals for 2026. The first Bingo card was my personal goals; the second, obviously then, for Smile. 

In my personal goals, I sorted my boxes by categories: health, hobbies, home, finances, career, relationships. Some boxes will be impossible to complete before the end of the year (a weekly writing project I’m working on that needs all 52 weeks, for example). Others could be completed in one really focused weekend. Already in the first week of January, I highlighted one box, signalling it completely accomplished. Others (like number of books read or movies watched) will be a slow burn.

I hit the ground running in January. Excessive cold in the Northeast had me leaning into reading and scheming—two of my favorite activities. Then we hit a flush of activity in February and I felt harried. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Bingo cards going untouched but also the laundry and the vacuum cleaner and the unanswered text messages.

I found myself needing a reset. Needing a weekend morning where I could sit undistracted with The Smile Project or with household chores or with personal obligations. I found myself wanting another hour in the work day to cross just one more thing off my to do list. 

And so the Bingo cards have been quiet. So easy then, it would be to place them in my desk drawer until December. To acknowledge that “the year is ramping up” and that maybe that December 31 optimism wasn’t practical. After all, it’s hard to look at my Bingo cards and know that I can’t even think about fostering another dog until I wash my bed sheets. 

But without that daily reminder—without the intentional choice of naming and placing and putting my goals somewhere where I have to see them—how quickly I might lose my year. How quickly I might forget how much I have to strive for and how excited I feel by all of it.

I am constantly torn by my perceptions of time. Often I feel it is fleeting and I must sprint through my days, crossing things off my list and staying focused from the morning alarm to the sleepy goodnight. When Smash Mouth said “the years start coming and they don’t stop coming?“ Unironically, I feel that now on a very deep level. How quickly did I turn 31. 

I worry sometimes that I will be 41 in another blink. Oh I don’t fear aging—nothing like that anyway. I’ll be honored to earn every wrinkle. But what I do fear is letting my days slip by and letting my weeks turn to months turn to years and what I do fear is letting my goals grow dusty.

What I do fear is not making time for my dreams.

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” (Earl Nightingale)

I’ve been a distance runner my whole life and even still when I signed up for my first marathon, I knew I was signing up for months of intentional training. I spent a couple hours crafting my training plan, printing out a month by month calendar, and hanging it on my bedroom mirror. I knew every mile I’d run from that day until the race. 

The time will pass anyway. 

Earlier this week, I was looking at my 2026 Bingo cards and I thought about how some of these dreams—especially on The Smile Project side—feel impossibly large. But marathons are not run in a day. Marathons, like many big goals, are a series of repeated actions day over day, month over month. It’s the continuing to show up when it’s hard or when you’re tired or when it’s 90 degrees and humid. 

Each of my Bingo squares represents an idea. Some can be accomplished quickly. Some are date specific. And some require a second sheet of paper—a built out, long-term plan. 

It’s easy for me to get twisted up in that last batch. Who among us doesn’t like crossing something off the list after an hour of work. The Bingo cards are forcing me to see the slow burn. The Bingo cards are forcing me to step back and maybe do a little reading and maybe do a little scheming. Two of my favorites after all. 

I can’t stop our rapid acceleration to March. But what I can do is check in with myself. What do I need to do today? How will that take care of my tomorrows?