How To Begin, Gently: Day 1 - On Not Rushing In

You know that low key anxiety that starts to bubble up around this time of year. You are spent from the all out panic of Christmas. But this is more like the prickly perlage in you in your Champagne glass, a quiet, bright, highly defined and persistent stream of quiet questions.

What are the goals?

How will you get there?

Who will you be?

You feel it every January. It is a collective compulsion.

So maybe you get a new notebook. A fresh calendar. An impulse to take stock. To be responsible. To chart a course. But as you begin to scratch and scribble, the wide open, exciting, aspirational landscape of the year somehow pixellate and shrink in to a series of boxes. Tiny spaces that you cannot escape until they are checked. Then the boxes become numbers. And the numbers somehow prove that you are serious about your life.

We call these resolutions.

And a resolution is more than a hope. It is a will driven promise plus a plan. It is budgets. And timelines. Metrics. Contingencies. Everything whittled down in to something measurable. Dreams as data that can be evaluated later as success or failure.

What gets lost in all that plotting is the actual essence of the life you want to live. The mornings where you are present enough to notice how your body feels before you decide what it needs. The meals that are chosen for warmth or for pleasure or memory, not performance. The conversations that connect because you are no longer thinking about what’s next.

January, in the American tradition, asks us to rush past all of this. It treats the new year like a starting gun. A race. As if momentum is the same thing as readiness. As if speed is evidence of certainty.

But you don’t actually need to begin that way. You never have. The most meaningful things in your life - relationships, work, rest, joy - don’t arrive because you forced them on to a calendar. They arrive because you were paying attention. Because you responded to the circumstances met in any given moment. Not preconceiving, but simply being present.

So when you say you want to begin this new year without rushing in, it doesn’t mean that you have no intentions. It means you are choosing not to borrow urgency from a future you can’t see yet. You are choosing not to mistake anxiety for insight. You are choosing to let the year reveal itself to you a little - before you decide who you want to be inside it.

Because January does not owe anyone a transformation. Or clarity. Or a clean slate. Or a perfect plan. That idea, that January exists to redeem us, is a learned and accepted illusion. It is cultural, very American and rooted in the belief that we should always be improving, optimizing, proving. Other cultures mark time differently. Through food. Through ritual. Through cycles. They understand that you do not need to erase yourself because a number changed.

You are trying, in this moment, to live closer to that truth. To let the year begin the way most good things do, slowly. With curiousity. With uncertainty. With spaciousness to notice what is actually here.

This pressure, the quiet insistence that you should already know what this year is for, is not real. You are exactly where you need you need to be.

And if you are reading this in bed, or over coffee, or in the middle of a busy day, consider this an invitation rather than a directive. You don’t need momentum to begin. You don’t need a resolution. You don’t even need clarity. You might just start by noticing where you are.

If you feel like sharing, I’d love to know: What are you choosing not to rush in to this January?

And if the answer is simply “everything”, that counts too.