Happy New Year!
Last time I posted it was New Year’s Eve and I’d spent the morning at an ecstatic dance event. I’d intended to go back after a spot of lunch, in time for the cacao ceremony and something with lotus flowers, but I got caught up with writing and committed to completing my Substack piece before returning to party. Though I’ll never know what the lotus flower thing was, I’m glad that I stayed to write. I don’t tend to make new year’s resolutions, but one of my intentions in taking a pause from what I saw as my ‘usual life’, and coming to Guatemala was to write. That morning a well-being provider invited me, as one of her WhatsApp community members, to choose a word that conveyed my intention for the year. A few words came to mind, and I remembered that someone at the dance workshop I’d just taken part in, had shared a word for how they felt when they embodied a genuine ‘yes’ response. It resonated deeply, yet the precise word eluded me when I tried to retrieve it from the memory banks. It was something solid, like sovereignty.
The word I settled on though, was unshaken.
Do you ever find yourself buffeted by other people’s thoughts and opinions about you, or your actions? Are you vulnerable to people-pleasing to keep the peace, or avoid conflict, or seek approval, and feel you’re doing the right thing? Many of us are.
At the end of last year, I set a boundary that wasn’t received well. I felt a familiar urge to explain myself, to be understood, and to repair what had broken. But I realised there could be no resolution in the way that I hoped. Instead, I chose not to defend or escalate, and to live with the discomfort and likely loss of friendship that followed. Letting that urge pass was more painful than setting the boundary itself.
I go into the new year accepting that I’ll not always behave in ways that people like, and that at times I may disappoint others or inadvertently upset them. And whilst this is not my intention, and it causes me distress, I’m also taking with me the wisdom that it’s not my responsibility to try to make it better for other people. When I have acted with grace, or set a boundary that others don’t like, my responsibility is first and foremost, to myself. I don’t have to be a dick about it. I can bend and receive their response like willow, but I’ll not be uprooted, and put their needs before my own in the way I too often have in the past. Uncomfortable though it can be. Our needs matter too. I’m learning to let my actions be guided by what feels rooted within me, rather than what I anticipate others might want from me.
Perhaps you recognise this tendency in yourself? People-pleasing is a pattern we have often been taught is polite, and maintains connection, yet too often it means that we abandon or disconnect from a part of ourselves. Shifting the patterns of our behaviour can lead to uncomfortable situations, relationships we thought were solid, might fall away, but in seeing who stays the distance, we also know who are the people who respect and value all of our parts. They are the ones that stick around.
So my word for the year is unshakable.
So, if I am not going to be so buffeted by other people’s views, or my perception of them, that leaves me to find the direction for myself. What will that be in 2026 for each of us?
Being away from home, leaving behind jobs, and friends and family, make this question even more alive for me, and perhaps there are things that make this year even more uncertain or full of possibility for you too?
Travelling to new places, and the turning of a new year, encourages us into new routines, and invites us to choose how we structure our days more mindfully than we might typically do. For instance, an intention that I keep starting and failing to maintain is to avoid my phone for the first hour of the day.
The routine for 2026 has been meditation, water, and write, before looking through my messages. It’s especially hard being behind the UK time zone as I know most days there will be a message waiting for me on the screen, and I have to resist the temptation to sneak a peek. It’s been seven days and I’ve not fallen off the wagon yet! It helps to keep coming back to my commitment that this period of travel has a purpose: to get back into a regular writing practice.
Purpose does not need to be profound or financially driven.
What I’m really practising here isn’t consistency, or discipline, or even writing as such. These kinds of resolutions can feel like instructions from the outside. Instead it’s presence that grows from the inside. Staying with myself when it would be easier to be pulled away by other people’s needs, opinions, my expectations, or excitement. Drawn to online board games, or Facebook posts where I could lose myself for hours. Instead, staying with the quiet nudge that says, this first, before the rest of the world arrives. Morning writing has become one of the ways in which I can notice whether I’m listening, or whether I’ve already abandoned myself for the day.
I’ve not got back on the Morning Pages routine of three pages of writing as soon as I wake, but I have had Beth Kempton’s Winter Writing Sanctuary to keep me focused. This is a free course I’ve completed multiple times before, including 24/25 it seems, as I discovered the files with my past writing on my laptop this week. Beth’s courses are grounded in the northern hemisphere seasons that were previously very familiar to me, but last year I was clearly adjusting to a different kind of winter in the Caribbean. The wintery prompt sparked a piece that had a familiar echo to it when I read it back this week.
Frost
Frost, I remember you.
I remember the white blanket you laid
over the surface like skin on rice pudding.
The water is much warmer here when I break through and swim,
diving beneath the waves.
The fish are visible, unlike before,
and I enjoy all of their colours,
lips pursed in a smile.
I’m pursued by the more curious, following me, seeking them,
all swimmers gazing at each other, in wonder.
Against the smooth surface of the sand, a ray.
Blue-black hitchhiker on its back,
serenely going about their way:
no worries.
Soon come.
A large head pokes from the coral,
grey body petering into a point of a tail,
fin gently swishing a sand angel.
I want to pop my head up and shout to my friend,
‘Shark!’,
but I’m a child of the 80s, traumatised by that cry,
and how it scatters the beach.
The sand collects on my fins as I put them down.
I lift the towel to dry off the water, thinking of the warnings
of hypothermia, back where I swam
with the air misting on the surface and freezing my face,
whilst here I’m warmed by the sun.
Frost, I remember you.
I’m not sure the rice pudding analogy in this poem really works. It probably reflects my home sickness and thoughts of familiar winter comforts that I was missing in the Cayman Islands, but I feel the familiar bite of the cold as I read it back with sun gleaming through my window now.
So whether you are currently surrounded by snow and frost, or on the other side of the world in the height of summer, or tropical climes where seasons are not similarly distinguishable, what is the word that you are taking into the new year?
2026 - Unshakable.
Not because nothing affects me, but because I’m learning where to return.
