Ballast

Given we’re not yet through the first week of the new year, I’m still thinking about new beginnings and resolutions. I still feel in a malleable space. I’m contemplative. I’m curious. I have aspirations fueled by a belief in what’s possible when we turn the page in our life’s story.

In these first seventy-two hours of 2025 I have meditated each morning for approximately 8 minutes (Ram Dass: Just Be meditation) and traded scrolling on my phone before bed for reading a book (current read – but almost to the end!: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik). These are habits I meant to start all of last year. Could’ve started at any point. Told myself most Fridays, in fact, that I’d start on Monday. There’s no rule that says you can’t launch a new habit on a random Thursday in August after all. I got a gym membership in the third week of June last year. On a Wednesday I think. And I’ve gone three to four times a week ever since. So, I have proof there’s no need to wait until New Year’s to start a new routine or change a habit.

Worse still, I knew I would be healthier for both returning to meditation and getting off my phone before bed. Yet, still, I waited until January 1, 2025. Why? There’s no rational reason. Obviously. See above. But there is the symbolic reason. January 1 is a new year. It is simply easier to set up new rules and structures for the story when the page is blank. It’s harder to get half or three-quarters of the way through a year and actually do the needed revision work. At that point, you might as well just wait for the next blank page to come around. Right?

At the same time all of this has been bebopping around in my brain (as my mom likes to say) a dear creative friend of mine said, “I’m not making resolutions this year. I know how to live.” Which got me thinking, yeah, I know how to live too. I’ve known for months now I needed to sit in meditation more regularly and that the scrolling on my phone was wasting precious hours of my precious life for truly nothing other than curated dopamine hits. I know I need to keep going to the gym and I need to detach from the anxieties of my paid work so I can retain energy for my creative work. I know I need more solitude than most, and yet I know I’m also craving community now more than ever. I know I’m forty-five and strolling (crashing? crumbling?) into perimenopause. I know I travel with grief and have big questions about purpose and meaning. I know my romantic relationship needs tending. I know I’m capable of change.

A blank page – whether at the New Year or at some other marked point on the calendar – can indeed be a helpful time to begin to make a change. Big or small. What I’m thinking about now though is what do I already know about the midway point of this coming story? Or the last fifty pages? What can I affirm about myself now so that when the time comes to revise (because that time always comes) I don’t hesitate again to do so? What do I know about living that will serve when I’ve become uncertain or uninspired or unmotivated? What do I know right now, before the story has even begun?

The invitation this week is to free write for ten minutes starting with “I know…”. After ten minutes, read what you wrote. Then finish this sentence: “I know these things to be true and therefore the commitment I make to myself is…”

May your ballast this week be naming your own deep wisdom and committing to its guidance.