Weekly Wednesday Wisdom #4

Annual edition

Hello friends and fellow lovers of wisdom,

I wish you well this holiday season and hope it was replete with peace, love, joy and other constituents of your good life.

Above all, I wish you rest, recuperation, and rejuvenation during this end-of-year lull between Christmas and the Gregorian New Year.

According to the Mayan calendar, the last five days of their year were considered unlucky and most people “stayed home and neglected all activities during this time to avoid disaster.” 

Whether or not you believe in luck or not, this sounds like good advice we would do well to remember and that there is a seasonality to all things.

I had greater aspirations for this final newsletter of the year, but alas, I would heed my own advice and take rest.

Typically, this is a time to pause and reflect, to conduct an annual review and so forth.

Instead, here’s a parting thought experiment for you, a Year End Preview, if you will.

Rather than reflecting on this past year 2022, write out how your 2023 went – what were some of the highs, what were you most excited about, who did you become?

For example, one highlight of my 2023 was my trip to Egypt. Perhaps I’ll tell you all about it in a later edition.

While this may seem merely an exercise in wishful thinking, it is a strange type of mental operation to remember the future. After all, it’s all just ephemeral thought-stuff anyway, isn’t it? The exercise is inspired by combining the work of author Benjamin Hardy (“Be Your Future Self Now”) and an NLP exercise that suggests we turn “to-do” lists into “ta-da” lists written in the past tense, making them true in advance.

Another helpful piece of pertinent and low-friction advice I find worth considering is deciding upon a word or phrase as a theme for your upcoming year.

While I haven’t yet decided, “one thing at a time”, “workflow” and “systems” are contenders.

Felix sit novus annus,

Tai