Wonder

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve been able to enjoy some downtime over the past week. We’ve gone from celebrating Christmas in Connecticut with my family to ringing in the new year in St. Petersburg, Florida with friends. It’s felt good to just live in the moment and take a break from all the personal development work that I’m normally into.

Still, I think it’s important to take some time to ‘harvest’ at the end of a year – to reflect on the highs and lows of the past year and what I want to prioritize in the new year. So last night, on our final day in Florida, my friend Bianca and I sat down to complete our 2024/25 YearCompass.** The whole worksheet is thoughtfully designed, but I especially appreciated these six prompts:

• The wisest decision I made…(taking back control of my financial planning)
• The biggest lesson I learned…(to trust that opportunities will flow freely if my aspirations and intentions are clear)
• The biggest risk I took…(not going into overdrive / panic mode when a major work contract ended, and instead taking a few months to work on my own creative projects and see what emerged in the meantime)
• The biggest surprise of the year…(how much I like Florida as a potential option for a new home)
• The most important thing I did for others is…(supporting a good friend through some mental health challenges)
• The biggest thing I completed…(designing a new change leadership programme)

While much of what I’m proud of from the past year has been professional accomplishments – the above-mentioned change leadership programme, making progress on Courage to Quit – what surprised me a little was my answer to “The Best Moments” – the greatest and most memorable, joyful moments of the year. These were all personal: spending the 4th of July with a good friend and her family in Kansas, New Years Eve with our friends in Florida, seeing Slash and his new blues band perform at the Greek Theatre in LA, celebrating my neighbour’s milestone birthday at our local Italian restaurant. The combination of lightness, joy, and deep care in my relationships with friends is a real source of energy and inspiration for me, as well as when I feel most present in life. And yet, these moments can be easy to take for granted and overlook or forget if we don’t consciously take note of them.

I love this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer because of how she frames these moments of joy and wonder – how even though we may forget the particulars, we are deeply shaped by the experience all the same. This year, while I’m not setting any specific resolutions, I will take Rosemerry up on her invitation to continuously practice the art of falling in love with the world again and again. Ultimately, it’s one of the best ways I’ve found to interrupt my own patterns of thinking and be more at peace with and accepting of what is.

**Another fun, simple activity is to look through your photos from the past year and pull out the first photo and last photo of the year, and any highlights in between. Here is my first, last, and a highlight photo for this year:

About Friday Pauses

We can all sense how a lack of presence in our daily life affects the quality of our relationships, our ability to form real connections – and yet we struggle to set aside distractions. In my Friday Pauses, I want to encourage us all to do just that – pause for a moment and feel what it’s like to be present by reading a poem.

If you’re new to Friday Pause, here’s what I suggest:

• Minimize or close other screens.
• Put your phone on silent.
• Close your eyes and take a full breath in…and out. Maybe count to four on the inhale and six on the exhale.
• Read the poem below – out loud, if you can. It will slow you down and help you feel the words more.
• Take another deep breath in…and out.
• Resume your day.