Even though every moment (every day, every week, every month) can be a new beginning for us, a new year feels significant. Probably because it doesn’t come around too often and with the changing of the year (and calendar page), it can feel like the right time to make other changes too.
For most of my time growing up, “new year’s resolutions” were the thing to do. I’d make my list of goals and each year would fall somewhere on the spectrum of forgetting them completely and checking off the entire list. My get-it-done nature used to be deeply satisfied with this structure.
Over the years though, I realized this old structure had become outdated. It was too tempting to pick goals I knew I could accomplish vs. thinking of what I really wanted and then creating a plan to get there. Having the yearly resolution-setting made it seem like goals were things to get done within a year and then start again, instead of thinking far out ahead to what I wanted for my life broadly and building to it irrespective of whether it could fit in a year’s timeframe.
Since those days, there has been an abundance of options people have devised for how to beat those new year’s resolution pitfalls. Having a word of the year, choosing one goal or desire and prioritizing it, making wishes, writing letters to or from one’s future self…the list of options goes on and on.
After a number of years and a lot of trial-and-error, I’ve landed somewhere in the middle. I actually think all year long about what I want, the life I want to live, how I want to feel, what I want to be doing. So the turn of the year doesn’t often unveil any giant surprises. But the end of the year feels to me like a marking point, where I can reflect back on how well I’ve been living into that vision, and look ahead to what I might want to change or shift to keep doing it even better.
In the end, it hardly matters what method you use. If you spend time thinking about what you want, however you do that, and then you go out and take steps to get there, however you do that, then you’re doing the work. Find the method that works for you and go get it!
How will you guide your year ahead?
