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For the past few New Year’s Eves, I’ve selected a personal word of the year in lieu of making resolutions.
Resolutions feel simultaneously too flimsy and too rigid to me, plus I don’t think a cold, dark month — made colder and darker by the fact that all the baubles and lights have been packed away — is the best time to completely overhaul your life, which is what so much of resolution culture is focused on.
That, and capitalism. From fancy journals to even fancier exercise equipment, there’s no shortage of ways to spend on self-improvement. Or, at least, the promise of self-improvement. We’re all fixer-uppers come Jan. 1, and it can be such a blurry line between wanting to become your “best self” and wanting to become… someone else entirely.
No thanks to all that.
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But, like anyone, I have things I want to accomplish and changes I’d like to make, and I find that a single word is a helpful, simple cue that can drive all kinds of behaviours in all spheres of life. I’ve selected “action,” “ease” and “intentional” in years past; action to inspire me to just do the thing, ease to convey that not everything needs to be laborious, and intentional which was mostly about getting off my phone.
My word for 2026 is “nourish.” I don’t just mean in terms of eating, though food is certainly part of it. I’d like to cook more, as well as figure out how to best fuel my body because, as it turns out — and I don’t know if you know this already — only drinking coffee and no water and eating lunch at 2:30 p.m. makes you feel bad?
But I’m also thinking about all the other ways in which we are fed. By conversation, by being present with friends, by going for walks in nature, by reading books, by looking at art, by so many things. I already do a lot of these things, but I don’t always prioritize them the way I would like.
One of the things that nourishes me most of all is this newsletter, so thank you, as ever, for being here. Happy New Year!
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