While the Gregorian calendar is not necessarily the best measure of time and accomplishments and life itself, it does offer a consistent opportunity to integrate learning through reflection and intention-setting. I believe that you can start a new practice on any day, at any moment, but I also struggle to resist the call of a clean slate, however manufactured. I don’t remember when I started taking my new year’s eve reflection particularly seriously, but it has become the most significant holiday ritual that I have. I make time and space for reflection in this weird black hole of a week, and I take a good chunk of the morning of New Year’s Eve to capture and crystallize that thinking on paper.
Now that’s not to say that I necessarily enjoy this ritual; frequently, I spend this whole week preparing and then put off the actual writing. Especially in challenging years, or when I am aware that the lessons of the year aren’t immediately evident or particularly flattering, it’s hard to get myself to sit down and face whatever it is that I don’t want to face.
But I never regret it.
The point of reflection isn’t just to reflect, although I do enjoy a sense of closure from pulling together lessons and themes from the year. My whole goal of the reflecting is to set intentions for the coming year that can help guide my decision-making and, ultimately, help me inch closer to creating the life I want to be living and the person I want to be becoming.
In Practice
I promise I’m only going into this level of detail because it was requested; as with everything, take what resonates for you and leave the rest.
Step .5: Reflective Questions from External Sources
I count this as a half step because sometimes I use them and sometimes I don’t. Some questions I’ve loved at times:
What’s the best adventure you had this year?
How did you get lighter?
What are you most proud of?
What did you fail at?
What moments brought you toward your values/purpose?
Who did you admire from afar and why?
I’ve also started using my Gentle Tarot deck to put together a reading of things to focus on for the coming year. Tarot still scares me a little bit, but I do buy into the idea that sometimes you are more receptive to your own thoughts when filtered through the lens of something else to clarify them (astrology, organized religion, a seminal text, tea leaves, whatever the thing is that feels authentic to the person using them).
This list from Courtney Martin offers some great questions to choose from. I also really enjoyed this list of questions, originally from Proust, brought to my attention by Mari Andrew this year, too. This isn’t a year-end reflection, but feels like a useful internal check-in. This might be a good place to start, particularly if you are a little hesitant about reflection either generally or because of how your year went. My answers are at the bottom of this newsletter; I’d love to hear any of yours that you feel like sharing!
Step 1: Reflective Lists
I start by looking at my intentions for the year before (which I also try to review at least once in the summer and ideally quarterly). I try to be really gentle in this process; sometimes there are pleasant surprises of how much I have done, and more often than not, there are abject failures. So I try to refrain from judgment and simply note what happened and what didn’t, and how I feel about anything that didn’t happen (half the time, I realize that it’s totally fine with me that a thing didn’t happen, or there’s a very good reason it didn’t this year).
After that brief check in, using the categories below, I make lists of these things (and others). Spelling and complete sentences don’t count or give you extra credit.
Things I Learned
Things I Almost Learned*
Important Media
Significant People
Moments I Want to Remember
*This is a list of things that I understood with my head but failed to put into practice. The best example I have is that I almost learned in 2017-2019 that exercise makes me feel better, but it took me until 2020 to move that onto my “learned” list because that was the first year I really prioritized moving my body consistently, even though my logical brain knew it was better for me by experience.
Step 2: Thematic Generation
After all the listing, I tend to take some time away from the lists and come back, then re-read all the reflections and lists together, looking for themes or patterns or connections to what I know may be coming up in the next year. I do free-form writing about that; sometimes that’s another list, sometimes it’s a bunch of paragraphs, sometimes it includes diagrams.
Step 3: Word of the Year
With a general sense of themes, I move on to thinking about the word of the year. I do this retrospectively; it’s an integral part of figuring out the essence of the year, kind of like distilling the experience of a yoga practice to a single word at the end of class. I know a lot of people generate a word for the next year, but I feel like that puts an awful lot of pressure on a single word and on me, and I often have enough areas to focus on that I can’t land on a satisfactory word anyway. I do go back and look at last year’s word, but don’t usually go further back than that (as you can see below, there are some repeat words, as well as some years where I apparently skipped this part of the practice).
Step 4: Intentions
With a well-rounded sense of what the year was and wasn’t and how I feel about it, I start to set intentions for the following year. My rule is that these have to fit onto two facing pages (I shouldn’t have to flip to see them all). I stick almost exclusively to “approach” intentions (things I want more of) rather than “avoidance” intentions (things I want to do less of/not do); thanks to one of my favorite podcasts of 2023 for that terminology.. I use the categories below to guide my thinking.
Health
Community & World
Career-Specific
Things to Allow/Things to Release (usually a T Chart)
Step 5: Releasing
This step can really be done at any point in the process. I learned this practice from my yoga teacher during the pandemic, and it’s simple but amazingly effective. I write down, on a looseleaf sheet of paper, anything I want to release or free myself from for the following year. Then I (safely, carefully), burn that piece of paper, watching it go up in flames and turn to ash and taking as many deep breaths as I need to to feel any kind of weight lifting.
I was amazed how a tangible representation of things I wanted to release helped me actually start to release the things. I started inviting my students to move through the same practice the next year, particularly an 8th grade class so special that my chest still constricts when I talk about them because I miss them so much. After students fold or shred things they want to release, I bring them home and burn them (carefully, safely) and make a video to share the following day in class. Then we set intentions and goals together for the coming semester. I was sure my kids were going to roll their eyes at this, but I’ve been amazed every time to see the power they feel like this simple practice holds and the trust I can build with them simply by actually burning the papers, exactly the way I said I would, and providing proof.
New Year’s isn’t an easy holiday. I find it deeply conflicting and know that it engenders a sense of loneliness for a lot of people, and a lot of others just ignore it completely. Using it as an opportunity to simultaneously celebrate the good things and learn from the bad things and release the really awful things helps to reframe the beginning of a new calendar year in a way that feels more grounded to me.
However you choose to think back on 2023 and set the stage for 2024, I wish you only the best.
Here’s January’s yoga schedule! Click on the calendar to register for any classes you’d like to attend, and let me know if you have any questions. I’d love to see you!
The Proust Questionnaire
What is your idea of perfect happiness? A way-too-late-into-the-night conversation with a small group of people I know well in front of a fire that, magically, doesn’t leave my hair smelling like smoke.
What is your greatest fear? Catastrophic disease, particularly if caused by something I did
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Putting people on a pedestal then being surprised/indignant when they don’t meet the unreasonable expectations I’ve set for them in my head.
What is the trait you most deplore in others? Lack of follow-through
Which living person do you most admire? Right now, Natasha Harper-Madison and people who approach their work like she does.
What is your greatest extravagance? Expensive candles.
What is your current state of mind? Trying to embrace a lot of not knowing.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Sticking things out at any cost.
On what occasion do you lie? To students about the reasons behind things when the answers are convoluted but not important.
What do you most dislike about your appearance? Proportions
Which living person do you most despise? A certain governor who shall not be named.
What is the quality you most like in a man? Competence
What is the quality you most like in a woman? Joyful relentlessness
Which words or phrases do you most overuse? Lolno, logistics/logistical
What or who is the greatest love of your life? Beautiful coincidences
When and where were you happiest? June of 2017, when I had a job lined up but had finished grad school and got to be blissfully summer institute tired and spend the month soaking up my favorite Austin things (is it any wonder I moved back?). Also every moment spent with aforementioned 8th grade class, both online and in person the year after.
Which talent would you most like to have? Something related to spatial awareness or sense of direction
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Being able to get up without using the snooze button
What do you consider your greatest achievement? Conceiving of and executing several new arts education programs and celebrations.
If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be? An albatross
Where would you most like to live? A picturesque farm in Vermont in the summer, the Texas hill country in the winter. Or really anywhere with an oak forest.
What is your most treasured possession? I’m obnoxiously sentimental, so too many to list, but two keychains from two separate quinceaneras of students currently.
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Norovirus
What is your favorite occupation? Anything with yarn
What is your most marked characteristic? Unintentional intensity
What do you most value in your friends? Ability to sustain and follow long, meandering conversations over long periods of time. Also clarity within those conversations and fearlessness to call me on my bullshit.
Who are your favorite writers? Ann Patchett, Alice Hoffman, Emily Henry, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Shakespeare, Vienna Teng, Barbara Kingsolver, Katherine May, Brené Brown, Temple Grandin, Ann Friedman
Who is your hero of fiction? Currently, Sebastian Duke from Tom Lake and Rebecca Welton from Ted Lasso (my hot take is that that whole show is actually about her), though my more consistent answers are CJ Cregg from The West Wing and the Princess of France from Love’s Labor’s Lost.
Which historical figure do you most identify with? Eliza Jane Reid, though she’s probably too current? (I struggled with this one)
Who are your heroes in real life? School mental health social workers, anyone making meaningful changes to large systems (i.e. generative agriculture), anyone quietly bringing grace and healing to others
What are your favorite names? Elizabeth, Kendall, Jordan, Carter, Michelle,
What is it that you most dislike? Bad school accountability policies
What is your greatest regret? Any time I’ve talked about people rather than to them, not standing up for one of my students who was being treated unfairly about what was a stupid rule in the first place.
How would you like to die? Not ready to answer that question.
What is your motto? The only way out is through.
Adding in this list of prompts, which I also love, that came through my inbox this morning: https://theisolationjournals.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=20xrt&next=https%3A%2F%2Ftheisolationjournals.substack.com%2Fp%2Fthe-five-lists-ebe&utm_medium=email