Issue #011 — On beginning again, gently

Friend,

January. The month of declarations. I am going to skip them.

I have never had a good year that started with a list of resolutions, and I have had several good years that started with one quiet sentence written on the inside cover of a notebook in early February. The sentence usually came after three or four false starts. It was always shorter than the resolutions. It always survived longer.

The problem with January, I think, is that we ask it to be a beginning when it is actually a continuation. You wake up on the first with the same nervous system, the same calendar, the same unfinished things. Pretending otherwise is exhausting, and the exhaustion is what kills the resolutions by the third week. Not lack of willpower. Just the gap between the story we told ourselves on December 31 and the body we woke up in on January 1.

So here is what I am doing instead, and what I am trying to commend gently to anyone in the same place.

I am not going to plan the year. I am going to plan the next four weeks. Four weeks is short enough that the plan can survive contact with reality. Long enough that something actually moves.

I am going to pick one practice, not five. The smallest one I can imagine still mattering. For me, this season, it is fifteen minutes of reading before bed, no phone in the room. Tiny. Boring. Repeatable.

I am going to write the sentence on the notebook. Not in January. Whenever it comes. It will not come on demand.

If you have already made a long list of resolutions and are doing well with them, ignore me. Carry on. If you are reading this on January 19 and the list has already collapsed, that is not a failure. That is the normal arc of January. You are exactly on schedule.

Begin again, gently. Smaller this time.

Yours,
Enova