I start my own new year(s) whenever I feel like it. On my birthday and at the Winter Solstice are the main ones, but every time I feel like I really just need to start over...then I gift myself a 'new year' in which to do it. Why not? Why not start a 'new' year on any calendar day? Start a new journal, a new diary, a new workbook. Start a project and mark its birthday. Start a love affair and do the same.
Or end something, like the old year, an old flame, an old unsolved round-the-mulberry-bush conundrum, and mark its passing. New years start with the ending of old ones after all.
So here's a thought to go into 2025 with: you are being given another 365 days, any one of which might be your New Year's Day.
All of that said...including the bit about my own new year starting on my birthday, and my acceptance of the planet's new year beginning at the Solstice...there is something that I cannot avoid about the calendrical shift. The move from one numbered year to another, is the one that most other people mark, and most of the people I actively engage with do so in as positive a frame of mind as they can muster.
So one thing I love about the December-to-January shift is how many of the things that drop into my inbox are actually positive, encouraging, hopeful. People are insistent on reminding me of things I already know...I am reminded that this is a time for re-committing, for becoming more (or indeed, less). I am reminded that it is a continuing as well as a beginning. Every day is a new day, but it is the same timeline. Every day, month, year, anniversary are merely markers in the sand. We can ignore them if we choose to, or we can use them. I have tendency to grab hold of them as if they were life-rafts.
Every opportunity to try again, make it better, give it another shot. I’ll reach out for all of them. And whatever I make of them ends up in my journal, and quite a bit of what starts out in my journal ends up here, wherever you are reading this. (And by the way, thank you for doing so. I genuinely appreciate it.)
I’ve documented my journey into journalling elsewhere. It was a fits-and-starts thing, or rather a fits-and-stops thing, until I did Jackee Holder’s Paper Therapy course, which took me into The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron), which codified and solidified my practice. I write my Morning Pages every single day; I come back to the journal during the day when I feel the need to. Or when I'm invited to, like when I'm doing a specific course related to journalling.
In many ways, it is still a fits-and-stops kind of thing. I have days when a thought takes me into flow, and meaning emerges. I have many more days when thoughts sulk in corners, like they point-blank-refuse to perform on command.
I have a lot of days when what I grandiosely call journalling is really just brain dumping, documenting the minutiae of the day before, boring myself by trying to understand my dream-state and making repeated claims to care or not care about this and that.
These days – some eight years on from that Paper Therapy course – Jackee talks a lot about journalling being “a skills-based practice.” I’m still trying to figure out what that means, and what it will mean for me personally, but I reckon it has to do with fewer brain-dump days, and more days of meaning.
When a phrase echoes, I know I am meant to take notice. "A skills-based practice" has echoed loudly for several weeks now. So I have taken notice and I have done these things:
- I bought Donna Ashworth’s Words to Live By – a daily journal
- I signed up for Sue Burge’s Almanac – a year of creative journalling course
- Despite the invitation to write in Donna's actual book and Sue suggesting her own idea of what might work for the course, I decided to keep all of the writing from both in my ongoing series of journals, rather than spreading it all over the shop and losing myself in the process. My daily journal is already part Morning Pages, part evening rant, part scrapbook, part workbook…it is my ongoing conversation with myself and my testing ground for what I might have to share with the world
If the true art of journalling is, indeed, “skills-based” then that is a skill that I would like to develop this year – which is one answer to the question about what I want from 2025, but not the only one.
Everyone living a conscious life starts each new year (calendrical or otherwise) with that question: what do I want from this year?
So, bowing to convention, on the 1st January 2025, I am asked: looking forward, dreaming big, starting small, what would I most like to see / do / experience in the next twelve months?
I pause to consider that word ‘most’. I could fill lines, if not pages, with things I want, big and small, but what do I want most of all?
World peace? A more equitable society? A safer, cleaner planet? Well, yes, obviously – but if those things were truly at the top of my personal list, wouldn’t I be doing significantly more to bring them about? Does it make me a bad, sad, dangerous person that I am not?
I am reminded of the TV character Lucifer who looks into people’s souls and asks what it is that they truly desire. I wonder what my own shocking answer to that question would be.
On this 1st of January (2025), there’s a weather storm passing through. If it has a name, I’m not interested enough to look it up. Instead, I hunker down in my corner chair while the rain batters the windows and overwhelms the gutters, puddling and pooling on land already sodden. Earth already bogged down, weeping back up. Wind snarling in corners.
One of the things I want to see now is snow: the bright white crystalline innocence of newly fallen snow. I want to hear the silence it engenders.
I have chosen Emergence as my January word, because I want, already, to emerge out of Winter. We’re just past the mid-point and I feel betrayed by Winter. It has become tiresome, this long procession of dark days when the sun can barely be bothered to rise, much less fight his way through the dense blanket of yet more rain-in-waiting.
This is not Winter. This dreary wet is an impostor. Where is the off-setting joy? The harshness of snow and ice and frost is balanced by glitter and sunlight. The tingle of clean cold burns our extremities and reminds us that we are alive with fire. This too-mild, too-damp simply seeps into the bones. It makes me feel old, and tired.
I take a deep breath and look further into the year yet to be. I could list the things I want to come in or to continue, the things I want more of – friendship, laughter, bluebells, gannets, crocuses, sea-swimming, sunsets, romance, travels, homecomings, dancing, poetry – in starting to do so, I realise that what I want most is to be delighted.
Delight is the most transitory expression of joy. It is the one that comes from the unexpected, unanticipated, moment of pleasure. The fairy moment. The sudden awe. The rainbow in the puddle. The stranger’s smile. The joke you didn’t see coming, that left you breathless with laughter – that one that somehow does the same a decade later when you know the punchline and have seen it a hundred times. The bluebirds taunting the hunting cat they know cannot reach them. The robin’s song just after the rain. It is The Clangers. It is a Sikh dancing in Yukon snow. It is that writer friend who always ends with a humorous twist.
Delight is looking around the table and wondering how come this works, the bunch of you with nothing at all in common, sharing food and stories, taking the occasional deep breath at the tough bits, then getting up and dancing together afterwards.
Delight is that cold splash of water before you swim.
Delight is an unexpected starry night.
Delight is a bonkers WhatsApp New Year’s Eve party.
Delight is snuggling back down into the duvet before you realise that you’ve already slept seven hours straight, and then sleeping some more. No, delight is when you wake up after that second sleep-shift…and you know the day is still wide open ahead of you, you haven’t missed or messed up anything.
Delight is light on the water…a single raindrop on a blade of grass…finding an unexpected five-pound note in a coat pocket…rediscovering that you like fresh fruit salad…the slight downward numbers on the scales and being back in your jeans…finding something you wrote ages ago and thinking Oh, I like that!
What I really want from 2025 is to catch hold of as many of these moments as I can. Not to keep them like fireflies in a jar, but to hold them long enough to make them part of me – the strays that will wander back into my head when I’m really old and dementia-ridden. In my dotage. Is that really what dotage is? Another word for dementia? Has it been here all along?
I want to hold these fireflies lightly, and weave their stolen essence into other things, and share those things, perhaps with you.
So, as selfish as it may seem, what I want most from 2025 is to be able to sit down at the end of it and say, “I’ve had a good year,” and for there to be someone willing to listen and wanting to hear me explain exactly why and how.
And because I’m not always quite that selfish, that’s actually what I wish for you too.
