Resolving on joy - #116

Welcome to the last day of a year, and for me, the first day of an age.

In the mirrored hall of year-end reflections, I am left with twice the work, for it’s not just a collective year that is ending, but my own. Today is my birthday.

From Twitter, lesser known as X.

It’s theorized that some 4,000 years ago the Babylonians came up with New Year Pledges, which they celebrated during the Ides of March when the year actually felt like it was renewing — not in the dead of winter based on some two-faced god named Janus. But I’m not here to upset Janus or any other long-ignored deity. I am here to talk about pledges and resolutions, and all the recently-anointed-as-feminine ways I prepare for the year ahead.

I never liked the way 2023 looked. Something about the 2 and 3 next to each other. It felt like frames askew on the wall, like dishes left in the sink, burdensome and sloppy. Looking at the number 2024, I feel the relief of something wiped clean even though I know it brings death, I know it brings hardship. I don’t care. It brings the opportunity to say that the previous year is over, and even as the roots rest dormant in the ground unaware of December 31 bleeding into January 1, I can pretend to seal off a box to store away in my memory. It’s a new year. Things will be better, god damnit.

Nevermind that my dog lays dying by my side. Nevermind that my body will not be my own come June. Nevermind that I don’t have an income. Nevermind all that! Resolutions aren’t reigned by grief and worry. They are the children of hope, determination, and delusion. And I love delusion. I find it to be the holiest of competitors for depression.

But my delusion does need a leg to stand on. If there’s anything I miss about living in a big city, it’s the ability to lose yourself in it. Self-examination, self-exploration, looking for inspiration broader than yourself — these are all things I find bolstered by novelty and anonymity. Bop into a kundalini class, spend a day at the museum, walk for miles along the storefronts and apartment buildings to a soundtrack of your making, writing stories in your head for every passerby. 

In this small town, every time I leave the house I see someone I know. You can’t well and right brush someone off someone in a small town by saying, “sorry, can’t talk, busy in my own private Idaho of fantasy trying to imagine how I will have the fortitude to make the year ahead magical and divine instead of a replicant of the shit show that was 2023!” I can, however, say this at home. Don’t bother me, I’m divining a future of fiscal independence and childlike awe.

And so at home, that’s what I’ve been doing. The snow hasn’t been very good and the mountain is crowded any way. The town is full of tourists, and my head is full of garbage. Home is the best place to take it out. So here are the ways I’ve been clearing my head, preparing to make 2024 better than 2023, and in general, taking care of my spiritual self. If you too find yourself at home this season lacking in year-renewing inspiration, may an element of this list serve you wherever you are.

1. Make a reading list

Is this an unconventional enough start for you? Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, etc., all reading is my salvation from scrolling. Creating a list of books I want to read for the year ahead helps me keep reading. It prevents those months of wondering when I last read. Instead, I have a note in my phone, and I can collect them one by one from the library to keep myself engaged. Some of the books on my list for this year:

• Finish Erica Berry’s Wolfish now that wolves have been reintroduced to Colorado

• Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series

• re-read book 5 in the murderbot series and then read the book 7, System Collapse

• Crossings by Ben Goldfarb on road ecology

• re-read Braiding Sweetgrass, it’s one of my favorite looks at parenthood

• V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy

• Tom Robbins’s Villa Incognito

• revisit the best of Terry Prachett

• To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christoper Paolini

That’s ~15 books, which I think is a good start to the list. This, along with The Atlantic, World of Interiors, House Beautiful, High Country News, and Wood magazine will keep my mind off the mindless.

2. Complete Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year

Unravel Your Year is the world’s longest journaling exercise, so I recommend taking the elements of it you like and discarding the rest. It won’t hurt Ms. Conway. But I did spend most of November and December in a depression, consumed by what a shit year 2023 was, until I did the month-by-month exercise. You go through each month of the year highlighting its ups and downs. To make this easy on myself, I go through my photos to remind myself what happened each month, and I was stunned by how much delight I’d forgotten or swept over: fostering! foster failing! cooking classes! stained glass classes! riding through the Montana wilderness with my mom! eating at Rosetta every day we were in Mexico City! reading the absolute smuttiest book in existence in Costa Rica! camping with Cooper! incredible concerts! backstage hangouts! a whirlwind trip to LA to see my best friends when I did not know I was pregnant! also I got pregnant!

Unravel Your Year helps remind me of the good and teach me from the bad. It gives me the information I need to make choices about how I want to live the year ahead.

3. Start a new tradition

Listen, this is hokey, but I think hokey is important lest you end up bitter and defeated. Because I forgot what made so much of 2023 good, I have a plan to forget less in 2024. I have this decorative bowl in need of filling, and I read online somewhere that a nice thing to do is simply fill it with memories. Polaroids, little notes about special days, perhaps a fortune cookie. Not every day will warrant one, but days will. And so you take the effort, the time, to fill the bowl.

4. Do a Tarot spread for the year ahead

I’ve come to really love Tarot this year. A Tarot reading is just a sermon. Sometimes what’s being preached applies, and sometimes it doesn’t. They are merely systems for sniffing out your own fears and worries, shames and hopes.

I wanted to do a spread for the year ahead, so I shuffled my cards and laid them out according to this grid. I only pull upright, not bothering to complicate my scattered practice with reversals, but there they were. A shit load of reversals. Someone had shuffled my deck. And some of these couldn’t be right. So I apologized to the deck, and shuffled again saying I would accept reversals this time and that if the deck had anything in particular it wanted me to listen to, that I would. 

Tarot allows for something called “jumpers” — cards that fly out of the deck while shuffling. And my deck had two of them. I put them aside to examine after I did my spread. The “year ahead" spread I chose outlines things like what I learned from the past year, what the next year’s theme will be, what obstacles I will face, etc. 

And what a spread it was. What to expect from the year ahead? The Sun. My biggest obstacle? The High Priestess reversed. Receiving The Sun as a prediction for the year ahead is a bounty. It’s essentially saying that the year will be framed in success and joy, and that it’s a good time to start a family. Well, well, well. The High Priestess reversed as my largest obstacle is really saying I need to trust my intuition. I need to return to listening to my gut. Listen to myself, and stop turning to external sources for guidance. 

Which is funny because look at the fortune cookie I got last week.

But back to the jumper cards. It was two cards from the first reading that I’d disregarded: 5 of Wands reversed and 8 of Swords upright. The way I’m choosing to read the wands card is leaving conflict and competition in 2023. I am walking away from that battle of the wands. The 8 of Swords meanwhile is a card that looks scary, but speaks to opportunity. It depicts a woman blind-folded and loosely bound, semi surrounded by swords in the ground. She feels trapped. She feels stuck. But if she would just attempt to break free, she’d see it isn’t that hard. It’s her own self-limiting beliefs that restrict her. 

Basically my deck told me to straighten up, let go of some bullshit, and move forward with confidence in myself and my intuition, because if I did, the year would be beautiful. A universal truth delivered on a coffee table. 

That is what I love about Tarot. I told myself what I knew I needed to hear.

5. Make plans, or plans to have plans

An old coworker of mine always sends out a year-end email, recapping his year. I have not spoken to this man in years, but I’m always surprised and curious when his personal summary arrives. This year, he did something interesting:

I’m not suggesting we all go make spreadsheets like product managers, but I do think it’s interesting to ask yourself: how many times do I want to see live music this year? How many times do I want to travel at least 3 hours from my house? How many novel classes or courses do I want to take this year, whether online or in person? How and how often do I want to explore my spirituality? How many new recipes do I want to try?

I think we’ve all had just about enough of improvement resolutions. What about joy resolutions? Novelty resolutions? Slowing the ever-increasing march of time resolutions?

That’s how I’m spending this birthday: imagining how to fill this year with joy, come what may, come what will.

Jenny Holzer