The Joy of Setting Intentions
Year-end is a beautiful time to re-align our lives – By Stacey Huget
Whilst I enjoy the hustle-bustle of the festive season, I always look forward to the quieter space and slower pace of the year’s end. Having given up making resolutions long ago, I still love the contemplative tea-sipping, stock-taking, intentions-setting practice that a frosty end-of-December day inspires.
Like a fall of virgin snow, January 1st blankets us in a new beginning every year. Now, one could argue that every morning does the same, but there’s something about that change in those annual digits that serves as a resounding punctuation mark in our lives. Maybe it’s John Lennon’s voice filling our head: Another year over, and a new one just begun.
For me, intentions-setting is not the same as resolutions-making. Where one holds space for us to gently grow in directions of our choosing, the other stands vigil, ready to reprimand us for stumbling off some rigid track of shoulds.
Whatever one calls it, there’s value in reflecting on the highs and lows of the year past – of what we enjoyed and learned and achieved, however we define it. And there’s value in imagining how we intend to be and what we aspire to become in the year ahead, and then declaring it – if only to our self.
It doesn’t have to entail rigorous planning and vision boards and journaling (unless that’s your thing). It could instead be a candle-lit meditation or a long walk in the rain or a music-filled reverie on the rocking chair by the fire (which is more my thing). The point is just to let the insights of the past drift easily through our awareness until our deepest yearnings rise up from our heart and write themselves on our psyche. Hmm, no – enough of that. Ah yes, more of that.
Intentions-setting is not the same as resolutions-making. Where one holds space for us to gently grow in directions of our choosing, the other stands vigil, ready to reprimand us for stumbling off some rigid track of shoulds.
This process of going inside and just being with our selves is an education any time of the year, but there’s something about the end of a year that fills it with light and hope, with a whisper of promise. We want this. We can do this.
Psychology presents us with wheels depicting the various slices of our lives in different colors and instructs us to balance our priorities and our energies among them: self, family, community … work, play, education … mental, physical, emotional, spiritual … and so on. This can definitely be helpful if we’re seriously off track, but many of us already instinctively hold space for the many dimensions of our lives while periodically grasping for that elusive balancing act – so graceful in our pop-psych, so clumsy in real life.
For most of us, there are certain things that just need doing regardless of how or where or when we’d plot them: changing diapers, renewing our insurance, laundering our clothes – the wood-chopping and water-hewing of modern-day living, whatever our enlightenment. But what’s easy for us to overlook is just how many things we do that are altogether unnecessary, or that don’t need to be done in the way or with the energy or for the reason we’ve been doing them. This is the terrain we are free to wander, to re-arrange, to reshape, to populate differently. This is where we can entertain the phrase: It doesn’t have to be this way.
What we’re looking for are all the ways – how we show up, the activities we engage in, the people we’re in relationship with, the livelihood we earn, the talents we share – in which we might be out of alignment with the Yes, hell yes! of our lives.
Re-aligning our lives takes effort, so we sometimes try to dodge it. We can have long conversations about all the reasons we can’t change all the joyless things about ourselves or our lives — and a few of them might even verge on the truth. But if we’re really honest, radically honest, most of it is so much blah blah blah. We’re merely afraid or lazy or resentful; or we’re mistaking all the self-limiting things we tell ourselves with actual fact; or we’re hoping like children for some miracle or beneficent person to change things for us.
Radical honesty can be harsh. But it’s also the first step in laying down new terrain.
What we’re looking for are all the ways – how we show up, the activities we engage in, the people we’re in relationship with, the livelihood we earn, the talents we share – in which we might be out of alignment with the Yes, hell yes! of our lives.
Now, I wouldn’t say I’m a master of radical honesty, but I had my fair share of experiencing it during my recovery from addiction – when the rubble of everything I had once believed (or dodged facing) lay around me and there was nothing left to do but perish or rebuild. I learned the hard way that impossible is just a word we throw around when we don’t want to admit to having hiding places. Relative to the possible, very little in life is impossible. There is usually a way.
So, what instructive conclusions can we draw from the rubble of 2018? What intentions will we choose for ourselves – how we want to grow or be and what we aspire to become or achieve – for 2019? And will we choose them with an open, gentle, believing heart?
No pressure, but remember the urging of the Talmud: If not now, when?
And for what it’s worth, I will be quietly sending my own Yes, hell yes! out into the world at the turn of the year. May it meet up with yours and dance a merry jig across the heavens until the very universe opens up for us in ways we dared not even imagine.
Last words to John:
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
