A New Theme for the New Year

As those of you who have read my blog consistently know, I am a thinker, a feeler, a planner. I might be someone who you think would be a big fan of new year’s resolutions. I’m actually not so much. I think new year’s resolutions are often too vague, too broad or too big. This often makes them hard to act on or hard to sustain.

Instead, I’m a fan of the writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin’s focus on actionable lists for each year – big and small things that you want to do. This year it will “26 in 2026”. You make this list at the start of the year, lightly monitor it throughout, and account for it at the end of the year with a “Ta Da List” of what’s been accomplished. For most people, there are items on the year’s list that are not completed and there are “Ta Das” that were surprises or developments of the year.

Along with these lists, she proposes the idea of a yearly one-word theme. I have tried the yearly theme with varying degrees of success in the past. But this year I’m really excited about the word I have chosen: distill.

The word offers multiple angles of interest for me. First, I love the liquid-related angle. To distill means to purify a liquid by changing its state. The reference is often water-related: distilling water by moving it through a process from liquid to gas and back to liquid. It feels meaningful to connect with water purity given my love of the Great Lakes – our freshwater oceans.

I also like playing around in my mind with the idea of changing state or changing form. This feels like the essence of an important trait to adopt in midlife (which I am in).

Additionally, I love the other meaning of distill, which is to extract the essential meaning or the most important aspects of something. This feels like another necessity of my stage in life and the world that we’re living in.

Thinking about distilling feels like an opportunity to revisit the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, which I first read six years ago and had a large impact on me. The book provided a framework for identifying the most important values and elements of one’s life (the essentials) and redirecting energy to focus on them. Be liberated by accepting the limitations of life and time and dive deeply into the essentials. There is joy and contentment to be found there.

The reference to a liquid also opens up the opportunity for me to ask related questions as I think about where I put my time and energy. What fills my cup? When the cup is filled, am I recognizing and being grateful for it? Conversely, what drains my cup? What might it be best to let go of?

In the spirit of the cup, let’s raise it up and cheers the new year. Raise that cup to possibility, to hope, to the human condition.

it is a serious thing

just to be alive

on this fresh morning

in the broken world