Fill it up!
Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.
Sylvia A. Earle
Welcome to a New Year! Opening the calendar for 2024, there is a vast sea of days to be traveled. Flipping the crisp new pages of the “old school” planner, each day an empty vault waits to be filled with valuable treasures. Voyages ventured? Appointments met? Celebrations remembered? And with a click and scroll of the iPhone screen, an entire year appears, each pixel a date yet to be. Which poses the question; what life will you collect this year?
When meeting with clients during the month of January, our discussion often begins with the pros and cons of creating New Year’s resolutions. Setting a few goals with willful intention are useful materials to build structure. When kept specific and with short term assessment of progress, New Year’s aims can be sustainable. Yet often New Year’s resolutions morph into lofty promises that evaporate and lose form, become hard to maintain and result in disappointment or worse yet, self-shaming.
Often we switch the language up from “resolutions” which can feel finite and rigid to “intentions,” a more fluid and softer blanket to carry our hopes for change. Any way you phrase it, the New Year is a time for reflecting what will be sought, kept or archived.
As you collect life this year, consider what you’d like to gather “more of” and what you’d like to have “less of.” Each day is a container you own, to fill up with smiles, gratitude, satisfaction, laughter and health while enhancing your strength and wisdom to remove, drain your day of disappointment, anger, bitterness, fear and pain.
What we collect in our containers is up to us, for example our work, relationships, travels, learning, friendships, activity level, nutrition, spending, curiosities, interests, and more. Life most definitely comes along and drops items in our containers of unexpected or unwanted content not of our choosing for example loss of income, betrayal by loved one, accidental damage to home or self, and more. Each day is a vessel to be filled, to collect more of what brings you contentment and pour out what does not.
This is an invitation to consider stepping back as you note the expansiveness the New Year while also moving closer to examine the possibilities of each day.