winding down
I was mindlessly scrolling on my Instagram account last week (digression: the mindless scrolling is getting out of hand, I really need to figure out how to ease up), when I came across a post by someone — Wiccan, maybe? A druid? — who shared that when it came to planning for a new year, she didn’t wait until the end of the year. Rather, it was her practice to make her resolutions for the upcoming year in the fall. “Now is when we determine what we want to plant in the spring,” she said. “Winter is far too late.”
There was something about what she said that made some sense: the holidays feel far too rushed to think about something as important as your intentions for an entire year. And it turns out that it’s pretty common for farmers to plan their spring crops as soon as early fall, after the harvest is done: they can look at what successes they’ve enjoyed, and plan make plans for the future. Winter, it seems, is more about maintenance, until the spring’s thaw makes the soil suitable again for planting.
This week starts the second half of my book tour, which means that the end is coming into focus — coinciding with the start of the holiday season. While I haven’t started planning my 2026 in earnest yet, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had glimmers of ideas of what I want for the year coming. So while I don’t yet have the space to really plan, I’ve been thinking about what questions I want to answer when I do have the time. Questions like:
what things went well in 2025?
what do I want to leave behind in 2025?
how can I make my work more soulful, purposeful, generous in 2026?
how do I want to feel by the end of 2026?
Come November, I’ll have some more space to ponder the answers to these questions, and record them in my journal. Then I can begin planning my year in purpose. I’m actually really looking forward to it.
But for now, it’s head-down-through-the-tape time. So for this week, I wish us all joyful productivity — but perhaps with a little bit of optimistic future-dreaming sprinkled in for good measure.
