Year end thoughts (Pt. 1)
The end of 2025 is rapidly approaching; it's cold outside here in the American Midwest, and I find myself doing a kind of typical (for me) end-of-the-year thinking. This is the kind of thinking that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, where I reflect on the year that has been and consider what I'd like to be different in the coming year.
The main thing that comes to mind is that 2025 was a year when almost every moment of my time had to be devoted to parenting, managing the household, running my practice, hosting events like CEUs and Linking Seminars, and serving as the secretary of the Lacanian Compass. This left scant time for everything that did not fit into those big buckets, and even less time for the unstructured, usually slow, daydream-ish style of thinking that I find helpful to my overall sense of being a well-adjusted person in the world.
As I write those words, I feel a bit guilty because I'm complaining... Given how good my life is, complaining feels wrong. Be that as it may, I'm complaining. But rather than dwelling on this, I'm going to move on.
The demands on my limited time and energy are not going to change in a way that makes it easier for me to engage in more of the reflective kind of thinking I long for. The seasons of my life that I'm in now will continue to be the season I'm in as the calendar year changes from 2025 to 2026.
Nonetheless, I want to find, create, and maintain new ways to make it more likely that I'll slow down and tune into my own head noise more frequently. That's my intention, my aim, what hope I'll be able to achieve to some degree.
The demands on my limited time and energy are not going to change in ways that make it easier for me to engage in more of the reflective thinking I long for. The season of my life I'm in now will continue as the calendar year changes from 2025 to 2026.
Nonetheless, I want to find, create, and maintain new ways that make it more likely I'll slow down and tune into my own head noise more frequently. That's my intention.
To do this, I'm going to aim to:
- Make my day-to-day as simplified as I possibly can.
- Reduce the number of things I invest time and energy into, and keep limits on how much time and energy I put into the things I do.
- Be consistent in my efforts to simplify and reduce.
That's it.
It seems so easy in theory, but I know that following through on this aspirational way of organizing life will be much more difficult in practice.
Wish me luck!
-N
