Looking back at the year that was

Lessons found in the rearview mirror

(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. As always, it’s unedited and today features Ben moving pebbles outside my office and our puggle Joey chewing on his foot at one point. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it!)

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Hello mates,

Just a quick reminder before we get into today’s letter that all remaining letters between now and the end of the year will be freely available to everyone.

And also a reminder that there is currently 25% off annual and monthly subscriptions* for 2024.

*If you’re a monthly subscriber (or your annual subscription is due to reset shortly) and would like to take advantage of the discount, I believe the only way to do this is to unsubscribe and then resubscribe at the discounted price. I’ve tried to find another solution but from what I see there is no other way. I’m sorry for the inconvenience!

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I know there’s still a couple of weeks’ worth of work to do, people to catch up with, school to finish and shopping to buy before most of us take a break for the holidays, but I can’t help but notice a shift in myself as we head into these final weeks of 2023.

Usually, I don’t feel the need to look back over the year until after Christmas, and sometimes not even then, but this year I already find myself looking both back and forward with equal amounts of curiosity. (I was going to write enthusiasm, but I think curiosity is a safer bet! It feels less like tempting fate.)  

So, the next two letters — today’s and Sunday’s — are going to do just that: look back and look forward. On Sunday, I’m also going to announce the details of next year’s collective 1% experiment and let you know how you can spend a couple of hours over January getting yourself prepped for it.

Today though, I’m looking back. Back over a year of healing, learning and relearning.

It started with time:

I took it. I spent it. I frittered and hoarded it. I cherished it and let it slip between my fingers, unnoticed. I looked back and saw how much of it has passed in a slow-moving instant, and I stared towards a horizon of some vague day in the future, trying to convince myself that when it arrives, I’ll be more ready.

We had family time, beach time, garden time and corn-hole-tournaments-in-the-backyard time. Down time, alone time, nap time, play time. Creative time. Outside time. Movie time. Frustrated and inspired and energised and sick-in-bed time.

All of it was spent. All of it is gone. All of it adds up to a new version of me, stacked on top of the old ones, like a tower of delicious pancakes.

It felt intentional. Positive. Hopeful. And, as often is the case at the shiny, new beginning of a year, I tried to convince myself that I could — if only I tried hard enough — wrestle control of that time. If I planned and scheduled and disciplined and squeezed my square, slightly chaotic self into the round hole of routine, I would become master of time for the year ahead.

I don’t mind that kind of enthusiasm. I don’t feel cynical about it anymore. In fact, it’s taught me a lot, and even though I never do it in the perfect, productive, bullet-journaling way I think I should be doing it, even a faltering effort to corral my time leaves something new in its wake. And I’m never not changed by an attempt at something new.

But no. I didn’t somehow manage to become someone entirely different this year. I am still somewhat disorganised and thrive with an ever-shifting mix of structure and room to play.

The real lessons arrived after those first weeks of slightly manic productive zeal had passed. And they were found in what remained. The imperfect efforts. The decision to show up anyway. The choice to put away my expectations and give myself over to the doing of the thing. That’s where I did most of my learning this year.

A gradual letting go of my standards — hell, even a complete dropping of them — meant that this year has delivered (and lovingly taken away) so much.

I wrote a lot.

If I combine the words I wrote for The Tortoise, plus the words I wrote in my novel (not to mention the words I wrote that will never see the light of day but that form the compost in which I grow everything) it would be at least 200,000 words. Maybe 250,000. And as I said in my last letter, this has been — by far — the most rewarding, enjoyable year of writing I’ve ever had. And I’ve been at this for 15 years.

I read a lot.

So what if I didn’t read all the non-fiction books I “should” be reading. So what if I didn’t read all the literary masterpieces that all the real writers are talking about. I read for joy. I read for escape. I read for enchantment and connection with my kids and to see examples of the kind of immersive, imagination-capturing work I hope to create one day. I’ve loved every second spent in other worlds this year and it has stoked my creative fires in a way I am completely delighted by. (If you’re curious about what I read, we talk about favourite books of the year in next week’s episode of the plodcast.)

I came to terms with new realities.

I accepted, finally, that my body is not capable of doing what it was five years ago. Some of that might come back as I continue to heal, but it also might not. I’m okay with both options, and the peace I’ve found in acceptance of what is, rather than what I wish would be, is enormous.

I learnt to rest.

And I’m learning to drop the guilt that comes with it. The capitalistic binary of being productive OR lazy is not one I find easy to let go of, and on many occasions I’ve found myself struggling to simply be. To stop. To rest. To do, quite literally, nothing. But both through necessity and effort, I’ve managed to embrace the discomfort, notice it for what it is (growth) and rest anyway.

I let things be.

If things were hard, I let them be hard. If I felt sad, I let myself feel sad. If I was agitated or over-tired or feeling completely mortified after an awkward social moment, I allowed it.

I use to resist negative feelings, try and brace myself against them, ignoring them or pretending they weren’t as bad as they were. But instead of helping, that approach usually meant I’d lay awake in bed thinking about them, feeling them, letting the worst-case scenarios take over at 3am as they tend to do, and I’d hold onto them for so much longer than was sensible. Now, I let myself blush when I think of the dumb thing I said, I let myself cry at the video of the kids when they were little, I allow my messy, broken humanness without any shame. And in the morning? It’s right-sized. Not gone, but also not overwhelming. It fades into the background, just another moment in a day, a week, a year full of them. It is genuinely, incredibly helpful.

I embraced the 1%.

This was my guiding word for the year and, probably more than any other guiding word I’ve had, I really tried to apply it. Either through small, consistent efforts or tiny, focused chunks of time, the 1% has showed up as small changes, long-term projects and micro-efforts that barely rate a mention but really do make things better. And 1% better over days, weeks and months does add up.

I think it was the 1% experiment that taught me the most over the course of the year. Not because, as I expected, it showed me the quantifiable changes that come from tiny, consistent efforts, but because it allowed me recalibrate completely what it meant to show up. A 1% increase in effort is showing up. 15 minutes spent working on a much larger project is showing up. No matter what form the 1% took, it was all showing up. And it was all imperfect. Because while a series of 1% efforts do add up, it’s also only 1%. I had to rethink what that looked like in a practical sense and that was a welcome adjustment.

I’m really excited about running the 1% experiment again next year, but this time as a group. I’ll share more about that on Sunday, but in the meantime, I’m curious: Have you looked back over this year? Have there been any lessons learnt (or relearnt)? Am I jumping the gun?

I hope the rest of your week has many lovely little moments, and I will see you on Sunday.

Take good care,
Brooke xx