Making Sense Of A Year
This past Sunday afternoon, we ventured to Joshua Tree to go hiking. It was a perfect 70 degree California December day. The sun was shining, and as we drove deeper into the desert, the world felt still and heavy with a peaceful calm. But I couldn’t quiet the growing anxiety and restlessness happening within me.
“I just feel like an oyster right now,” I finally shared.
I have to admit that I’ve always been fascinated by these little sea creatures. Remarkable beings that have a way of taking in all of the morass from the sea and turning it into something beautiful, rare, and perfect. But before the pearl emerges, it first has to be grit, slime, and other odd enzymes made from a combination of sea water and the oyster’s being itself. It is only as a result of reacting to the mass amount of stuff that the oyster has encountered, that it will ever produce the proper enzymes that eventually form the pearl.
As I reflect at the end of 2023, I relate so deeply with this process.
This year, I’ve taken in so much. New learnings, adventures, insights, experiences, relationships, challenges, and on and on it goes. These encounters were neither wholly good nor bad. They all taught me something and made up the tapestry of my experience this year. But right now, in December, with just 11 days to the end of the year, it feels like a lot.
And I, like the oyster, am feeling the call to step away for a while and close my shell to try to make sense of all of this stuff that has come into my awareness.
The beautiful truth about the oyster’s process is that it needs all of it. It needs to pull in every bit of what it encounters. If there is no agent, there will never be a reactant.
It also needs to close its shell for a time and do the hard work of examining and “dealing with” the stuff that has come into its orbit. It’s only through this intentional process that a pearl is able to form.
There was a time in my life when I didn’t reflect. I didn’t really examine or take inventory of the year behind me. I would rush headlong, exhausted but excited, into the Christmas season, pour myself out to family and friends, try to recover for a few days with naps, games, and mindless movies, and then find myself right back “in my normal life” on January 2nd.
The problem with this cycle was that by March, I was inevitably frustrated. I hadn’t taken the time to really look at who I was the year before and what had occurred so I hadn’t made any changes. And while I wasn’t creating the year for myself, others were most certainly doing that.
Work had done strategic planning and laid out a set of plans and objectives for how my professional landscape would look in the coming year, and in some cases, how my individual role fit into that.
Family was busy plotting out trips, holiday plans and other obligations for the year ahead. My community had already agreed on a calendar of events through the next Christmas season. And on and on it went.
During one of these cycles of frustration in mid-March about 7 years ago, I realized that I wanted things to be different for me. I started to get curious about what agency or power I had in all of this. It was my life, after all.
Long story short, near the end of that year, I found helpful resources that supported my own reflection on the year that I was completing, and gave me guided prompts to create the intention for my year ahead. And I was invited into a community of people who wished to step away in early January to do the same.
In no small way, this practice changed my life. When I look back on the past seven years, the growth, fulfillment and joy that I’ve found in the culmination of ordinary days has been extraordinary due to this practice of both understanding the year behind and creating the year ahead.
So as we wind down for the year, my soul is yearning for that time. I’m itching to step away and reflect — to consider and remember. To leave behind what will no longer serve me, and to take forward what I cannot live without. To express gratitude for the lessons learned, the growth, the change. And to transform expectation into belief for what the 365 days of 2024 will hold.
I trust that as we allow ourselves this gift of reflection, we will find our experiences from this year to be the catalyst for the pearl that will emerge for 2024. And the beautiful thing about pearls is that they rarely exist alone. They do so much better when gathered together, side by side.
This is my prayer for each of us in 2024:
That all you’ve been will be transformed into all you are becoming, and that you will have the full knowing that you are not alone in that journey.
If you desire support in your reflection of 2023 + creation of 2024, this reflection guide and 2024 planning workbook created just for us can be found here (… and it’s on holiday discount until year’s end).