Reflections on the power of doing

I haven’t set myself New Year’s resolutions for the best part of a decade. In fact, I don’t take the dark dismal days of January as a time for thinking about the future at all. Instead, back in 2015, I decided to use all that “wintering” energy to reflect back on the year that had been, and to make a list – not of the things I wanted to do or to change, but of all of the things that I had done in the previous 12 months.?

Like Manisha, I have a super-wicked inner critic. I also have a nearly pathological tendency to put myself into difficult or demanding situations. I generally explain it by telling people that I am only happy when I’m “like a cat that has tried to jump up a wall that is just too high for it, so its front paws are on the top of the wall, but its back paws are frantically scrabbling for traction to try and haul itself up”.?

And so that’s often the situation I find myself in at the start of a new year (or really, at any point of the year), hanging on for dear life, trying to wriggle my way over an obstacle that I threw myself at voluntarily knowing that it was too high, too much of a reach, somewhat outside my comfort zone.?

So, in those moments, it can be genuinely helpful to take some time out just to write down what I did last year. The good things and the bad things. And then reflect on it. Think about how daunting last year seemed at the start of it, and then what I actually went on to do, well or badly. It’s a kind of self-soothing. It makes me feel competent. It surprises me with what new things I have learned to do. It reminds me what it was I swore blind I was not going to do again. And I am still here. I survived it all – even if was awful.?

And then, with that renewed sense of my abilities (to persist, even if nothing else), I find that I can face the challenges. I can imagine that there is a way to scrabble my way to the top of the wall, even if I have no idea how I am going to achieve it, because I have done it before. I am still here. I am more than I was before, because I have learned.?

There is a word for it in Sanskrit. Sankalpa. San - to be at one with - and Kalpa - time/the subconscious mind. We use it to set an intention in a moment or in a practice, but the framing of that intention isn't "I want to be" or "I resolve to be". It's "I am".