A Year without a Goal
working against type for 2023
Hi folks,
Happy New Year!
A few housekeeping items before we get to it:
The free group guide for Hope: A User’s Manual has been copyedited by Eerdmans and will be released within days! I’ll share it here, but let me know if you’d like me to send it to you personally when it becomes available.
New year, new features in The Blue Room too! Free Friday newsletters will continue each week for everyone, but paid subscribers at any subscription level will receive two additional posts each month. In January I’ll be writing a personal reflection and an AMA (ask me anything–send me your questions!). Members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian in Herndon receive complimentary gift subscriptions upon request.
Longtime readers know I make a big deal out of the New Year. Part of it’s having an early January birthday; part of it is loving the freshness of starting anew. I’ve done it all: I’ve made resolutions (keeping them is another matter), I’ve set intentions (same), I’ve worked toward goals or habits, I’ve picked out a word for the year… I even wrote a workbook/playbook for several years, to help myself and my readers close the book on the previous year and turn with purpose toward the new one.
This year, though? This year, I’m not feeling drawn to any of those things. This year, I find myself viewing the whole enterprise with suspicion, as if capitalism itself has infiltrated our desire for vibrant and meaningful lives and turned that into something we must do, produce, or consume. Ahem:
This week, my therapist read me a reflection from Naomi Holdt, written about a year ago but perhaps as resonant now as it was then. She says in part:
No one I know began this year on a full tank… We crawled into 2022 still carrying shock, trauma, grief, heaviness, disbelief… The memories of a surreal existence.
And then it began… The fastest hurricane year we could ever have imagined. Whether we have consciously processed it or not, this has been a year of more pressure, more stress, and a race to “catch up” in all departments… Every. Single. One. Work, school, sports, relationships, life…
[Our] attempts to recreate some semblance of “normal” on steroids, while disregarding that for almost two years our sympathetic nervous systems were on full alert, has left our collective mental health in tatters. (source)
Still, I tried to do the New Year, New Me thing. I figured, what harm would a focus word do? I even had a couple options I’d been kicking the tires on. The first was ease, which I’ve written about. The second was boundaries, which I’ve also written about.
And yet even with these prospects, I resisted. I respect however you turn the page this time of year, including treating January 1 as just another day. But this time, for me, picking a word and slapping it on the side of my life felt too much like grind culture. Too Instagrammy. Like a goal in disguise… like putting a haphazard coat of paint on an old jalopy and passing it off as elegant, instead of giving it some much-needed time in the shop. But wait, no, that’s not right either. Life may feel a bit shabby sometimes, but it’s not broken.
In fact, our lives aren’t machines at all. If they are, let’s dismantle them, removing the toxic materials and letting the rest of it languish in the yard so the parts can be overtaken by wildflowers. I write in the book about the difference between getting through something and moving through it. The former has always felt like brute-force, put-up-your-dukes effort. The latter is more supple, yielding. Like dancing. Yes, I want to dance my way through 2023. I want to crowd-surf it and child’s-pose it and saunter through it and knead it like dough and put a grain of it in the ground and gently tamp some soil on top of it, and beckon others to join me in those gentle embodied labors.
Naomi Holdt suggests we treat one another as if we have invisible “Handle with care” posters around our necks or “Fragile” tattoos on our bodies. That’s the energy I want to bring into 2023. This is not a January 6 anniversary post, although maybe it is: as I write this on Thursday afternoon, we do not have a functioning House of Representatives. What a fitting reminder, two years later, that we’re still in the “if you can keep it” phase of our republic. Sometimes I think the powers that be must look at the aspirations we average folks have of changing the world and chuckle at how adorable we are. But as I heard someone say a while back, “I used to want to change the world. Now I just let people in on the freeway.” Maybe that does change the world. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s the only work to do when someone’s got their blinkers on, trying to merge.
Anyway…
I’d made my peace with not having a New Year’s Whatever.
But then, something happened I didn’t expect.
I found something when I wasn’t looking for it.
I’ve asked for your attention long enough for one day, so I’ll share that story next week. In the meantime, steady on.
~
Link Love
I loved the quote below, which came from this post:
