January Field Notes

Having just resurfaced from the watery depths of Covid, I am ready to revisit my New Year visioning ritual. It’s a critical path to feeling properly grounded intellectually and spiritually before each new year and requires a bit of focused time to sink into the process.

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Holding space to reflect, recalibrate, and renew intentions at the start of a year sets you up to feel grounded, clear, and energized to accept the change you are ready to make. It clarifies where to direct your focus, how much of yourself to give, and when to let go. By creating a vision based on your values, you can set intentions for your growth that align with who you are becoming, allowing you to do more of what you love and what you’re great at. This is a recipe for calling in alignment and aliveness into this year and years to come.?

We begin by taking an account of where you are coming from to understand where you are going. Allocate a journal or notebook to your continued musings. Give yourself space to keep coming back to these questions daily in small bursts of focused energy. Allow yourself to open up and sink into these questions.

Here we go!

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1. Write out everything you remember doing, feeling, achieving, celebrating, and risking this year. Finished projects and unfinished. Capture it all, or at least the highlights. Review your calendar and your photos from last year to reboot your memory.

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2. With this overview of your past year complete, you can begin to reflect on what you notice feeling, honing in on what you feel yourself wanting for yourself in the coming year.

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3. Circle one word from your 2023 reflection write-up that holds energy for you as you look ahead to this year. Maybe the word or phrase is time, aliveness, community, growth, or self-care. Whatever emerges for you, circle it.

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4. Next turn your energy to dreaming up your 2024. What does the year ahead of you look like? How does your one word align with the dream taking shape? What will happen in an ideal case? Why will it be great? Write, draw, let go of your expectations and dare to dream.

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5. With the one word that you circled in reflecting on 2023, look at each area of your life through the lens this word offers. Decide on your goals for each of the below areas of your life. When I did this, I plucked out the word aliveness from my reflection. Applying the concept of aliveness as a lens to my life helps me get specific about what creating this feeling looks like in all areas of my life.

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You try it!

6. Choose three tenets that will guide your choice of action to support your growth and alignment in equal measure. Such as . . .?

• Wherever you are is exactly where you are meant to be. (A favorite of mine that reassures me that life is a journey.)
• Be more present and aware because it is only in this present moment that we are truly alive.
• Curiosity disarms judgment, so let your curiosity guide you.

I have some big trips coming up in the first part of the year that are thrilling me to the point I am struggling to concentrate on anything else, but nothing is distracting me more than my May trip to Campania, Italy.?

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In November, after much deliberation, I decided to commit and offer to take my mom to Southern Italy with me to visit the birthplace of our ancestors, the home of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather who emigrated to the US through Ellis Island in 1901. Mom has been helping my brother, Grant, and I petition for Italian citizenship over the last two years and having never traveled to Italy with my mom before after all my years living and traveling there since college, it feels like it is high time we go.?

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I have been in enough therapy this year to truly believe that this is a great idea for us. No doubt it will be challenging, but it stands to be so fulfilling to travel with my mom to a place we both hold sacred and that will undoubtedly make us both feel so alive.?

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I’m also pumped because I have never been to Naples, and the more I research it the more I feel it will surely feel like a homecoming on a molecular level. I have been to Caprí, which is on our itinerary (Surprise Mom!), but I promise this time to not sunbathe nude in mixed company as I did the last time I was there in college.?

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Or maybe I will! We’ll see.?

Pause and reflect.

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What is the boldest risk I feel called to take this year? Name it! What makes it so scary to admit to yourself and what will help you commit to doing it?

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Set a 20-minute timer and write without editing.

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Write your vision story for 2024.?

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Place yourself in the future at the end of 2024, as if you are sitting down to reflect in your journal or a conversation with a friend. Describe your past year in what you experienced, what you loved, what you learned, and especially what you appreciate about yourself for daring to live outside of your comfort zone.?