It’s that time of the year again friends. That time where I sit down and work through Susannah Conway’s Find Your Word and Unravel Your Year workbooks and meditate on my word and intentions for the new year. This has become my new year ritual. I’m always so excited to delve into these workbooks and reflect on the past year and plan for the future.
This year was a tough one though and I’m not as excited this time around as I was last year (and every other year prior). I don’t know, it’s hard to think of the future when I know we’re all still going to be stuck in this limbo for a few more months into next year. It’s difficult to plan tangible things when you don’t know how everything is going to pan out.
So since I don’t have any control over the current situation we’re all living through, I’ve decided to take a more inner approach to my word and intentions for 2021. I’m going to work on me and try my hardest to dig deeper and continue my unraveling.
My word for 2021 is a gentle unfurling.
Yeah, I know that’s not a word, but I had a special feeling about it since late October that it may be what I need to guide my year.
That’s about the same time I really started working on my creative self portraits for my new project of the same name. I really want that project to be more of a focus next year, but I’ve also expanded a gentle unfurling to mean more than just that photography project.
So for every word, I always come up with a few supporting words that I use to signify aspects of my life I want to keep into focus and work on. For this year, I’ve chosen supporting words that support various inner aspects of my life: unraveling, exploring, and becoming.
Unraveling is obvious. It’s a process I do every year regardless of my word. It is undoing the knots that bind me to unravel the gems hidden inside that I have yet to discover. The very core of a gentle unfurling is unraveling: of coming apart, being revealed and spread open. It’s exposing myself to myself. It’s wonderfully enlightening and I want to continue the process in 2021.
Exploring adds to it by pushing myself to explore more. To kind of push myself to my limits and see what happens. It’s a bit of inner excavation. If you’re anything like me, you kind of keep within your limits–or what you’re familiar with handling–and don’t step beyond that. I especially know it takes a lot for me to get out of my shell. So I’m hoping to push myself a little this year. I think exploring and being brave to do so will help me learn more about myself, my limits, and what I can or can’t handle.
And the last word is Becoming; beginning to be. This is the very last bit of the process and I’m quite curious to see the person that will begin to emerge by this time next year.
Since my words are very introspective this year, the projects I’ve been thinking about keeping seem to reflect that as well. I’m still not 100% sold on doing some of these projects, but here’s what has been muddling around in my brain for the last couple of weeks:
- a deconstructed unraveling journal
- a gentle unfurling creative self portrait project
- a simple scrap therapy memory planner OR a yearly memorydex
- a mixed media sketchbook
I know I tend to focus my intentions on my creativity and general self improvement, but these are a few other things I’d also like to accomplish this year:
- I love to read more books! I’ve always been an avid reader, but as I find myself creating more, I consume less. Reading my towering stack of unread books though is something I’d love to do more of next year.
- Get outside more. I’m a natural homebody, and since I can’t really travel abroad like I’d normally do right now, I’d love to just get into the habit of getting outside more. Maybe take more walks around the city or even day trips upstate just to break up the monotony.
- I would love to spend less on things I don’t need but want. Sometimes these sort of purchases are empty purchases that settle a craving for something I don’t necessarily need. I would really like to curb that and spend less. Thereby accumulating less stuff.
I think all of these intentions are doable and I can definitely achieve them. I honestly think the toughest bit will be keeping them at the forefront of my mind so I don’t forget about them with whatever the world decides to through at me next.
Do you choose a word for your year and set intentions?