Issue #010 — A year-end letter on what I am carrying forward

Dear reader,

A year-end letter, of the kind I always mean to write and usually do not.

I am not going to do a list of accomplishments. The internet will be full of those for the next three weeks. Most of them are lying, gently. The good year and the bad year often look the same on a slide deck.

What I want to do, instead, is name the things I am carrying forward. Not goals. Not resolutions. Just the practices that earned their keep, and a few I am quietly retiring.

Carrying forward:

A weekly walk with no podcast. The first month was excruciating. The third month, ideas started showing up that I had been waiting for all year. I cannot prove the connection. I am sure of it.

The phrase that does not need to happen this week, said out loud at the end of every Sunday planning session. It has saved me, conservatively, eighty hours.

A monthly ten-minute review of where my money went. Not a budget. Just a look. The looking is the practice. The number always tells me something about what I cared about that I did not realise I cared about.

Quietly retiring:

The pretence that I can read three books at once. I cannot. I never could. I am going to read one book at a time, slowly, and stop apologising for it.

The morning routine that was secretly a performance for nobody. I have replaced it with: wake up, drink water, sit for ten minutes, start work. It is not a routine. It is just what happens in the morning. That is the upgrade.

The belief that I should have figured something out by now. I have replaced it with the suspicion that the figuring is the work, and the work does not end. That is not a sad sentence. It is a relieved one.

Whatever you are carrying out of this year — the heavy thing, the small grief, the quiet pride you have not let yourself feel — I see you carrying it. Set some of it down before January.

I will see you on the other side.

With care,
Enova