Thank you for sharing your reflections. I also create specific intentions and goals for each new year, then reflect at year’s end through that lens.
2023 has been one of the richest years of my life. I accomplished or made real progress getting started on intentions for the year.
1. Continue my „A Year to Live“ project and bring it to close on February 28.
I can’t overstate the importance of working through this year to me and my relationships. I‘m still too close to distill it, so I won’t try yet.
What I hadn’t considered - or imagined completely differently - was how I’d feel after the year ended, so I was surprised by the feeling of loss (at no longer thinking about my own death everyday!) and „now what-ness“ in early March. Navigating the new „Now What“ was/continues to be an unexpected continuation of the project.
2. Start and make progress on a 1000 days project
I see I’m the one blocking my creative expression, but couldn’t logic myself around perfectionistic tendencies inhibiting me, so I devised a project that would last longer than I can really imagine, in which frequent failure wouldn’t mean failure of the whole. When I reach 1000 days of any creative self expression, it will be finished. Then I will find out what it’s about. I don’t need to wait for a brilliant idea to start.
I worked on it 165 days this year. Although there was some sewing, some drawing and an ongoing photography thing happening, most of those days were the months I spent designing and building a temple. In September, 150 of us filled the completed temple with photos, letters and other remembrances. Then we burned it. It was sublime.
3. Embrace responsibility, whatever that means.
This has meant becoming more practiced at observing and owning my life past and present. My good or bad choices, areas of resistance and impulsivity, that part feeling sorry for myself and the vicious self critic. It would have been impossible without my prior and ongoing work on compassion.
I also took on leadership roles that sometimes overwhelmed me, but that I carried to the end. I worked to notice the circumstances in which I overcommit, and trusted myself (in small pieces gathered over time) to do something hard all the way to the end, in the face of both appreciation and lack of it.
2024 Intentions and goals
1. More silliness, spontaneity and fun in my daily life.
I tamed the impulsive younger me by breaking her. Oops! It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’ve got to relearn what used to come naturally. My plan is to do some silly or spontaneous thing in hope of having fun and relearning how.
2. Reorient my introspective attention externally
After a few years of introspective meditation (and decades of hypervigilance over my interior life), the next step is to focus these skills to what‘s happening outside me. To start, I’ll be practicing situational awareness a few times a day. A randomly timed reminder will prompt me.
3. Grow my courage
This will likely be a kind of year long meditation, like responsibility. My first hard goal will be to stop apologizing, except when I‘ve acted against my values. I hear myself saying „I‘m sorry“ reflexively in social situations and have a sense it comes from anxieties, so drops of courage will be needed to sit with the discomfort of saying something different or nothing at all.
Thank you for sharing your reflections. I also create specific intentions and goals for each new year, then reflect at year’s end through that lens.
2023 has been one of the richest years of my life. I accomplished or made real progress getting started on intentions for the year.
1. Continue my „A Year to Live“ project and bring it to close on February 28.
I can’t overstate the importance of working through this year to me and my relationships. I‘m still too close to distill it, so I won’t try yet.
What I hadn’t considered - or imagined completely differently - was how I’d feel after the year ended, so I was surprised by the feeling of loss (at no longer thinking about my own death everyday!) and „now what-ness“ in early March. Navigating the new „Now What“ was/continues to be an unexpected continuation of the project.
2. Start and make progress on a 1000 days project
I see I’m the one blocking my creative expression, but couldn’t logic myself around perfectionistic tendencies inhibiting me, so I devised a project that would last longer than I can really imagine, in which frequent failure wouldn’t mean failure of the whole. When I reach 1000 days of any creative self expression, it will be finished. Then I will find out what it’s about. I don’t need to wait for a brilliant idea to start.
I worked on it 165 days this year. Although there was some sewing, some drawing and an ongoing photography thing happening, most of those days were the months I spent designing and building a temple. In September, 150 of us filled the completed temple with photos, letters and other remembrances. Then we burned it. It was sublime.
3. Embrace responsibility, whatever that means.
This has meant becoming more practiced at observing and owning my life past and present. My good or bad choices, areas of resistance and impulsivity, that part feeling sorry for myself and the vicious self critic. It would have been impossible without my prior and ongoing work on compassion.
I also took on leadership roles that sometimes overwhelmed me, but that I carried to the end. I worked to notice the circumstances in which I overcommit, and trusted myself (in small pieces gathered over time) to do something hard all the way to the end, in the face of both appreciation and lack of it.
2024 Intentions and goals
1. More silliness, spontaneity and fun in my daily life.
I tamed the impulsive younger me by breaking her. Oops! It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’ve got to relearn what used to come naturally. My plan is to do some silly or spontaneous thing in hope of having fun and relearning how.
2. Reorient my introspective attention externally
After a few years of introspective meditation (and decades of hypervigilance over my interior life), the next step is to focus these skills to what‘s happening outside me. To start, I’ll be practicing situational awareness a few times a day. A randomly timed reminder will prompt me.
3. Grow my courage
This will likely be a kind of year long meditation, like responsibility. My first hard goal will be to stop apologizing, except when I‘ve acted against my values. I hear myself saying „I‘m sorry“ reflexively in social situations and have a sense it comes from anxieties, so drops of courage will be needed to sit with the discomfort of saying something different or nothing at all.
Best of luck in the coming year.