Change is inevitable. If you, like me, are going through a period of significant change, take this as a reminder to be gentle with yourself. A new year can bring hope – for a clean slate, a fresh start, a much-needed reset
Life moves so fast. Faster now than ever before. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had some trouble adjusting to the quickening pace of life post-pandemic. I’m a proud introvert, and life in lockdown made me realize how quickly I had been moving through life before, and how society seems eager to get us moving that quickly once again. I’ve started jokingly calling it “the circuit.” Once I finish my rounds of family visits, social outings, work responsibilities, and household chores, the circuit begins all over again.
Every year at the end of December, I like to set goals for myself. Not in a “I need to have New Year’s resolutions or I’m not productive enough” kind of way – more like overarching goals to set a foundation for the year. Sometimes I don’t accomplish any of them, but every year when I review what I wrote 365 days before, I am pleasantly surprised at how much I did accomplish (especially because half the time I forget I even wrote it down as a goal). Let me know if this is something you’ve ever done before, or how you like to create yearly goals. Mine are in a PowerPoint that I’ve been duplicating since 2021, which seems to do the trick. Sometimes I add fun little pictures, too!
For 2024, one of the most important goals I’ve set is to slow down. To find what fills my cup, and simply do more of it. To go on more long walks just for the sake of it – to take in the trees, the birds, the little universes that exist all around us.
I’m starting this blog to share a part of this journey with you – a journey to more cozy corners, delightful reads, moody walks, and moments of inspiration. I hope you don’t mind and, at the very least, I hope it makes you feel understood. The world could us more understanding.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a little on edge. I’m just starting to realize that “the edge” I’ve been fearing is change. Or, as one of my favourite literary heroines, Anne Shirley, puts it “the bend in the road.” If you haven’t read Anne of Green Gables, or anything by L.M. Montgomery, I’d recommend it as one of the coziest of reads. I always return to it when I need a little pick-me-up. Recently I just re-read the last chapter, which has become the inspiration for the blog post, and the mood I hope to take with me into 2024:
“I’m just as ambitious as ever. Only, I’ve changed the object of my ambitions… I shall give life here my best, and I believe it will give its best to me in return. When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes – what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows – what new landscapes – what new beauties – what curves and hills and valleys further on.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Here’s to 2024 – and to all of the good things that lie around the bend in the road! I’m wishing you nothing but the best for this exhilarating new chapter.
Talk to you soon,
J. Shirley
