On Jan. 1, I resolved to do very little this year.

A few days before, during a random interview for a local news piece about resolutions, I said as much to the reporter. I’ve spent 37 years stuffing every empty corner of my life with activity — mental and physical — so I thought it’s about time that I slowed down a bit. Smell the roses.

Breathe in the cold winter air. Chill. Plus, my health — while still relatively good — has been barking back at me, asking me to pretty please take care of it for a little while and maybe feed it some good food now and then. Apparently a family-size bag of Cheetos and bars of peppermint bark are not part of any food group that the U.S. government recognizes. Bummer.

It turns out that Grand Junction is a fantastic place in which to slow down. I grew up largely in busy metropolitan centers, the kind with snaking interstates and honking horns, where people don’t really look at you so much as through you.

In a place like Dallas, for example, innumerable places exist to distract you from whatever ails you: Enormous shopping malls in which to get happily lost for hours; restaurants offering every ethnic flavor known to mankind; big-box stores like Ikea and the REI flagship store that double as adult playgrounds; Six Flags; an annual Renaissance festival; the State Fair; and tons of professional sporting events.

Sure, you can spend plenty of money at any of these places, but you’ll never get bored. And unless you’re truly hard to please, you can never complain about not having enough to do.

Still, I’m really liking this resolution to do, well, not much. I can hang out at my favorite local cafés — Coffee Muggers, Cups, Colorado Java House — for hours, as I recently did at Java House while I waited for Mueller’s Auto Shop to finish working on my car, and not ever be shooed off because I spent too long nursing one cup of tea.

Few things compel me out of my chair; in bigger cities, sitting around for longer than five minutes makes me antsy. I always feel as if there’s SOMETHING I had to be doing somewhere, and if there wasn’t, then damn, I’d better think of something.

There’s always a play to see, a new museum exhibit to visit, a new restaurant to try out, a new concert to pay big money for. There’s always this feeling that one must constantly be moving in order to feel part of the community; otherwise, you’re slowing everyone else down.

There are things I don’t like about living here, just as there are things I disliked about the big city. The latter gladly offers snarled traffic tie-ups, a pea-soup horizon from dawn to dusk, too many opportunities to spend your money, ever-longer commutes, anonymous neighborhoods. Rural towns can be very isolating, conservative, racially homogeneous and have only mediocre Tex-Mex. But their charms can make up for lots of disappointing nachos.

When I was forever moving, striving, climbing up, up, up the corporate ladder, I rarely paused to take a breath and enjoy my all-too-brief time here on earth. My annual resolutions always took on Biblical proportions: lose weight, eat nine servings of fresh produce every day, get a promotion, finish my epic novel, volunteer at the animal shelter at least once a week, make bigger donations to more charities, create a successful Internet company, get published in The Atlantic Monthly, save the world.

Naturally, by the middle of the year I would have forgotten most of the resolutions, but there’s always next year, right? And when you’re living in a big city, where appearances can matter so much, and people are constantly engaged in self-improvement programs throughout the year, loading up on Dr. Phil and Oprah and Bob Greene and Suze Orman books at the bookstore and organic pomegranates and grass-fed beef at Whole Foods, it’s very easy to fall lockstep with them and their quest for The Perfect Life.

Well, not this year. I like my tea but I also like my full-fat-milk café au lait. I spent a whole day last week watching reruns of favorite TV shows from the ’80s and ’90s, including old episodes of “M*A*S*H.” I read a whole book, walked around my neighborhood and generally just let life pass me by. And it felt great.

So this year, I hope to finally accomplish my one resolution: doing very little. (Well, OK, my other resolution is to finish that epic novel, but I’m hoping that “doing very little” will free up more time to help me in that endeavor.)

So far, so good.

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Marjorie R. Asturias is a freelance writer and weekly FP columnist living in Grand Junction. Reach her at marjorie.asturias@gmail.com.