Year of...

 It's sort of funny, if you think about it.  We put so much emphasis on one day of the year (New Year), as if it will magically turn us into a better person.  We talk about resolutions, and this year many people are also hoping that the world itself will shut the door on the previous year, as if all of the crazy that has been going on will suddenly disappear, just because we changed the number on the year we write down.

I am a big believer in goals and working towards improvement.  But I've never really liked resolutions.  I feel like we treat them like on/off switches.  We set a resolution, and it's push push push trying to 'achieve' it, but the second we hit a snag, it's like "oh well, guess that's not happening," and we give up.  Sure, some people manage to make resolutions work for them, and that's wonderful, but the vast majority of resolutions that seem shiny and worth it in the flash of New Year's celebrations turn dull and dim when we think about all that we have to do to actually get there.

I haven't done resolutions in years, but that doesn't mean I don't make plans and have goals.  I have found that setting particular goals (with specific outcomes I want to achieve) doesn't seem to work well for me.  Instead, what I do is pick a focus for the year.  I name my years.  I have had a Year of Moons, a Year of Divination, a Year of Magic, a Year of Wellness, a Year of Runes, and this year I am working through a Year of Rebooting.

There is a pretty popular practice of picking a word of the year, and picking a focus is sort of similar to that.  It's not really a goal, though often there are goals that hang out under the umbrella of the focus.  And a focus is more...well focused than a word.  I have found that looking for a word of the year normally leads me to a feeling or an emotion.  If I find a word, it is something I want to be, whereas a focus is what I want to do.

I'm someone with a lot of interests, and I always have more that I want to do than I will ever have time for.  Picking a focus for the year helps me narrow the field.  It's not an exclusivity thing, of course I will do things that don't fit in my focus for the year, but it does help me keep moving in one general direction.  Without a focus, I will drift all over the place, and I find that I end up starting a lot of projects but not finishing that many of them.

And it's not even about finishing everything.  Many of my years have had very ephemeral progress.  Take my Year of Runes.  I had lots of plans.  I was going to work through several books I own, I was going to do more castings and other rune related work.  I ended up doing almost none of that.  But I thought a lot about the runes, I read a fair amount, I continued with my daily rune draw, and at the end of the year, I felt strangely more connected than I had at the beginning of the year.

I often think of my Years as being either passive or active.  Even though the Year is a focus, some focuses require more outward work, and others are more in line with reflection or observance.  I tend to flip flop my Years, so if I have been working what I think is a more active year, I'll be drawn to something more passive for the next year.  

Keeping your focus for an entire year takes a bit of work.  I use my planner to help keep me on track, and like most projects, the start of the year involves the most preparation.  For me, the planner works because it is something I work with every day.  I always have my Year written down, and often have a few more pages devoted to it.

But I also use my Year as a lens through which I filter other things that I do regularly.  Take this year, the Year of Rebooting.  A few pages I like to have in my planner revolve around tracking:  keeping track of stuff that I feel might be important.  When I built my trackers for this year, I thought about what it meant to Reboot my personal life, and what things I needed to track to give myself the feedback I needed (on whether the Rebooting was working or needed adjusting).  In fact, all the pages I have done in my planner so far have passed through that question:  how does this fit with my Reboot?

Depending on what focus you pick, that determines how much planning you may want to do.  When I was doing the Year of Moons, I knew I wanted to work each moon phase, so that was a lot of little steps.  For my Year of Magic, I wanted to make sure I was doing Sabbat observances, so that meant taking a bit of a broader view.  This year, I know that regular check-ins are vital, so I'll be doing reflections at the end of each month.  Whatever plans you feel fit your focus, keep them somewhere that you will be reminded of them, whether that means using a planner, programing them into your phone or putting sticky notes on your mirror.

One wonderful side effect is that keeping a Year's focus draws things that fit your focus towards you.  It's like when a friend tells you they love flamingos, and now every time you go to a store, you notice flamingo products....and you swear you never saw them before!  This is why picking your focus for the year is something you should take your time with....make sure it's something you want to be surrounded with (and, of course, make sure it's something you actually want to work on for a whole year).

We all want that feeling of a fresh start, that the New Year heralds shutting one book and starting a brand new one.  We want to feel like we can have a better year, make better choices, be a better person.  If you are finding that resolutions aren't working for you, why not try a focus instead?  Think about what you want to do, in the coming year, and make this your Year of....