In the Unknown of a New Year

how will we show up?

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

Hi there,

We wrote some wonderful poetry together at the end of December as winter showed up, and I’m so grateful for this community. I’ve been wondering what to say about 2024, and I haven’t really come up with much.

What I know is that I am just another liminal-space-storyteller reminding us all that it’s okay to feel complex things as 2024 shows up.

I’m watching a lot this last week, people on social media and in other spaces, noticing (with a feeling of admitted dizziness) the way people approach the new year:

I’m giving stuff away every week!

I’m not a new me, I’m the same me trying to survive!

Forget the new year everything sucks!

I’m going to read two books a week (yes that one’s mine)!

I’m only doing things that bring me joy this year!

The above picture of me sitting in my kitchen on a step stool, reading a book, comes with these words:

I’m thinking this is where I’ll find myself a lot in the coming days, cooking, prepping, experimenting, reading on the step stool when I’m tired of standing.

And it’s not just a new-year-new-goals thing, but something that’s been shifting, a new season making its way through me these last few months.

I’m asking so many questions lately, our family is, about what kind of people we want to be, what our ethics are, who and what we care about and why.

The beautiful thing about becoming a climber over the last 2 years (and finding myself in so many other ways) is finding a sort of home for my body and soul but also a space to ask big questions about land, movement, belonging, food, community, and more.

It’s shaping me as a writer and parent. It’s bringing me home to myself.

I have goals for how many books I want to read in the coming months, and I have goals for what foods I want to consume and in general what kind of consumer I want to be. More goals than I’ll be able to keep up with, but that’s okay. It’s always okay.

So this tiny, wonderful kitchen with onion peel on the floor and dog bowls strewn about, where music and podcasts play and entertain, is also an incubator of sorts, where the world comes to meet me and I meet the world to figure out who I am.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

All of the ideas shared above are totally valid ways to approach a new calendar year, and I’m simply noticing the diversity of need that folks have. Some of us need a lot of structure, want to be bettering ourselves, make way too many resolutions. Others don’t want to have a damn thing to do with the idea of a new year, and I love that, too.

Many of us are feeling overwhelmed by all the different ways people are approaching it, while also holding the realities of atrocities happening all over the world. How do we hold our place in history, in this current moment, with our layers of privilege and perceptions, with care? How do we show up?

Liminal space, right?

I personally feel a lot of tension with this. I like to make goals seasonally, but I also love a new calendar year to-do list, checking off those boxes as I ease into January, getting the Apartment Therapy January Cure series of things to do around the house starting in the new year.

I want to change everything and nothing at all.

I go back and forth with all of it, but here we are, just as we are.

My partner Travis asked me over coffee last week if our resolution list (especially when it comes to climbing/adventure goals) should change, and right away I felt my response in my gut: no.

The lists and goals we’ve created so far are exactly as they need to be, and whether we reach those goals or not, they are a reflection of what we hope for in our daily life.

I told him that we have no idea what opportunities will come up in the coming months, or how we’ll change, so how can we know?

I think I want to leave that word with all of you, too: you can’t know how you’ll change and show up this year, so let your goals be as they are now, and know that things will change later.

Photo by Gabriel Alenius on Unsplash

I think this is why I love the idea of seasonal goals, allowing our lives to shift and change and our needs and wants along with them. What is working for me in this hibernation season of winter may not work when spring arrives, and that’s okay.

We get to change.

So all those goals I’ve made, all this energy I feel as the new year shows up, will only work if I take my time and actually trust myself.

So, mark up the journals.

Make the book lists.

Change things and keep dreaming.

Sit still and listen.

Hold the liminal space, and don’t be afraid of it.

We are human beings, always arriving, remember?

Onward friends, into a new season of remembering that.