New Year’s Irresolution
I hope you know that you are enough.
Right now, right here. You, as you are today, are enough.
That’s not to say we don’t have some growing to do, more un-learning and re-learning to take part in, some more healing to find. But there’s a difference, an important distinction to make, between accepting yourself as enough while acknowledging your imperfections, and bowing to society’s pressure to be “perfect,” i.e., a finished, polished product.
You can be enough and still be flawed. You can be whole and still have room to grow. You can fully embrace the unique you-ness of you, while still making space for more of your and others’ complex humanity.
This is the truth I hope that we can hold on to today as one year comes to an end and another begins. Because what can be a beautiful time of reflection and gentle newness has too often been taken hostage by consumerism and lies telling us to buy more, do more, so that we can feel that we are in fact more than the pain and hurt and imperfections we carry. But these lies are just that – untruths, deceptions, false realities that taunt us, telling us we should be able to achieve this intangible state of being “more.”
The truth is, life is hard. The truth is, none of us are all one thing or the other. The truth is, you are not a project to fix and finish this new year.
We don’t know what exactly this next year will bring. But I imagine that there will be a lot of joy. Possibly exciting surprises or fulfilling plans. And probably tears. Hurt. Anger. Maybe even some rejection.
I wonder if part of the reason we set New Year’s resolutions is because we need to feel like we have some control over what’s coming next. We want to make a plan of attack for the next chapter, especially if the last 365 days didn’t go as we had hoped or planned. So, we itemize our dreams and make lists out of hopes. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t thing goals are bad. But I wonder if they’re not the point.
What if the purpose of a new year is to simply remind us of who we are? To gently prompt us to look back and embrace what is, so that we can then reorient ourselves towards what could be? Perhaps we cannot move forward until we find presence.
Presence: a state of existing. Not of striving. Not of achieving. Not of problem-solving, but of being. Breathing. Bringing awareness to who and how we are right now.
How can you bring presence to your new year?
Maybe you reflect back and make goals looking forward. Perhaps you choose a word to bring focus to your hopes for the next year.
Or maybe you embrace irresolution, grounding yourself in intentional hesitancy, giving up control, not because you don’t have more you want to do, more you want to become. But rather because you choose to let yourself be enough. You choose to trust your intuition to guide you towards how you need to grow.
I don’t think it has to be all one or the other – all goals or just floating. Perhaps this tension of both-and is where we might find some peace, knowing that in it all this next year, it will be hard, tiring, joy-filled, mundane, and beautiful.
Whatever comes your way, however you choose to welcome the new year, I hope that you enter it grounded in the goodness that is you.
May we become resolved in our irresolution, making space to simmer and percolate; to plan and remake. May this next year be full, not with lists and must-do’s, but dreams and want to’s. May we welcome the new year with presence, knowing that it will be hard and wonderful and complicated, just like most worthwhile and wild things are.
