New Year, New Vision

It is that time between Christmas and New Year, that liminal time that I always secretly love where the hours seem to lose themselves and the outside world to disappear. Cocooned in a cosiness of warm fires, leftover Christmas food and slowness, it is a time when we find space to go inward and dream our lives anew.

This year I have been doing some particularly deep thinking. I feel like problems and struggles that I have been brawling with for years are finally starting to unravel and dissipate, and a tentative hope is growing that this year will finally be the year that, no longer held back, I can burst into a new life of fullness and thriving where anything is possible.

While it is good to bask in this glow of possibility for a bit (it is a pretty rare feeling for me after all) I do need to be careful not to get carried away, to not - in the casting out of old unhelpful beliefs - just let in any old new ones. And while I deserve to celebrate and revel in this feeling of progress I know too that I am not finished and the next things to be worked on are already starting to present themselves. There is work to do too; the universe helps those who help themselves so as much as this is a time of deep thinking and reflection, it is also a time for planning and preparing for action. Like everyone else one of my New Year's resolutions is to get fitter, so I schedule time in my planner to go for a weekly run, start a yoga class, go for a long walk on the weekend. I want to write more too so I buy nice new notebooks and sign up for classes to keep me motivated.

One of my biggest rituals at this time of year is completing Susannah Conway's beautiful Unravel Your Year workbook. Full of deep and probing journaling questions to help you reflect on the year gone by and ponder what you want from the year ahead, she graciously offers it as a free download for subscribers of her newsletter (sign up at www.susannahconway.com/love-letters) and I can't recommend it enough. She also makes a booklet on how to "Find Your Word" for the year, another tradition that I like to indulge, choosing a guiding word for how you want to feel rather than a list of stale resolutions. My word for 2023 is "becoming", a vague and abstract one which feels at once overly trying-too-hard-profound but also kind of apt. I have played around with a few possibilities but this is the one that I have grown attached to. It is a word that captures the feeling of tentative hope and progress towards a life of integrity that I want to bring into 2023 whilst also allowing that I haven't reached it yet, am still growing towards it.

Another favourite if cliched tradition is to make a "vision board". This year's (above) is a collection of images printed from google and pritt-sticked onto a double page spread in the front of my planner in another attempt to capture this feeling that I want to create. Pictures of mountains, cabins in the woods, piles of books and open notebooks scrawled with writing - they change little year on year really but this year some pictures have crept in of people, groups of hip young friends having fun, that's new. Maybe I am coming out of my solitude just a little bit. I could get obsessed with vision boards, the creative act of curating collaged pictures to pin down something elusive and intangible like a mood or a feeling or a dream lifestyle. I once had a whole notebook just for vision boards and brainstorms about various things, it was very inspiring. Making one once a year doesn't seem like enough.

Of course my creative dreaming side is balanced by a more rational, practical, planning obsessed one, and so turning the page from my vision board is a scribbled master plan of everything I want to do this year. Arranged into life areas like Work and Money, Chores and Tasks, Body and Health, Chill, Creativity, Social, New, it has everything on it that I want to fit into my time from simple daily tasks like cleaning my teeth, to books I want to read, to major life goals and the steps I need to take to reach them. I break these down into daily, weekly, monthly and one-off tasks to forward into the appropriate section of my planner, just another resource for staying on track towards the life that I want to be living. With all of this to inspire me how can I not start the year positive, content, quietly motivated?

Most people I know don't really seem to celebrate New Year. Exhausted by the excitements and stresses of Christmas they prefer to let one calendar year slip over into the next without fanfare or commotion, but I like to do something to mark the occasion, preferably get away to the mountains with good people and good books and good whisky - start the year as I mean to go on. Usually this backfires epically and I end up spending an underwhelming New Year alone (or at some godawful party full of rowdy people I don't like) but this year I managed to pull it off. After an admittedly torturous nine-hour drive of standstill motorway traffic, wondering if the car was going to make it, and blowing my snot-bunged nose through several rolls of cheap service station toilet paper me and my friend Joe made it to the Scottish highlands and New Year was spent in a cosy wooden lodge surrounded by beautiful snow-capped mountains and quiet.

In the evenings I read my books and wrote and drunk wine while Joe noodled soulful folk songs on his guitar; during the days we went for gentle snowy walks exploring the nearby Creag Meagaidh nature reserve, seemingly endless miles of crunching white in crampon boots, rust red bracken, hidden lochans in frozen mountain corries and avalanche warnings. At the stoke of midnight on New Year's eve we were out on the lodge's veranda writing our names with sparklers with a dram of whisky while the muted bang of a handful of distant fireworks sounded from Spean Bridge. A very auspicious start indeed.

On the day that we had to leave, after we had packed our bags, loaded and defrosted the car, taken the bins out and scanned the cabin one last time for things left behind, we stood on the veranda in the cold and looked at the mountains for one last, long minute. While we stood there it began to gently snow, just the odd twirling snowflake at first, then more consistently, a slowly falling blanket of lacy white, and I thought this, this is how I want this year to be.