The older I get, the more abstract my new year’s resolutions are. I used to make lists of things to accomplish. Now the new year spread in my notebook is not much more than a floating cloud of nouns: community, ease, trust, bread.

And it makes sense: practically speaking, a year is an unwieldy period of time for projects. Any project that takes a year will definitely need to be broken down into sub-projects, and that’s what weekly or monthly plans are for.

So now, I don’t make resolutions. Instead, I think about how I want to be in the coming year, what I want to think about, and what I want to invite into my life. I try to choose a single word.

Joy

As I was thinking about the year ahead, I kept coming back to the same word. It’s a lovely word, short and clear, like the ringing of a bell. It sounds like what it is. My word for 2022 is joy.

Joy because life is beautiful. Joy because life is short. Joy because even when things are hard, you can still find light.

I’ve rediscovered joy lately, unlikely as that sounds in the middle of a pandemic, and I suppose choosing it as my word is a way to say to myself, “more of this.” “Say yes to this.”

But also, community and engagement

This year didn’t want to be contained by just one word, though. Other words kept popping up to accompany joy.

Joy initially came up in a conversation I had with coach Sara Smeaton. We were talking about what I want from my life (as one does, when one is being coached), and I described a life perfused by community, engagement, and joy.

I mean community in the sense of having a rich social and professional life, being connected to interesting and wonderful people, and being with them often. And also in the sense of being connected to the neighbourhood and city that I live in.

And I mean engagement in the sense of participating in life, in community, in democracy and in public conversations. Engagement, to me, means reading books and articles, thinking deeply about things, and making connections. It means going to concerts and shows. It means being informed and inspired, and acting accordingly.

Joy, for me, follows from community and engagement. Joy is people, feasts, laughter, music and singing and dancing, brilliant ideas, adventures and shenanigans.

As an aside

Sara had the idea that I might organize my coaching business around community, engagement, and joy, because as well as being what I want more of in my life, those are also my strengths. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like, but I’m going to keep those ideas in mind as I plan my year.

Bread Time

Along with community, engagement, and joy, I’ve also been thinking about time.

I learned about Bread Time from Tara McMullins. Essentially it’s the idea that things take as long as they take, that there are natural rhythms to things. It’s called bread time because sometimes bread rises in an hour or two, and sometimes it rises overnight, depending on a multitude of factors.

I’ve always struggled with clock time, although I didn’t realize it until recently. When I had a regular job I particularly hated the tyranny of mornings, the feeling that I was already behind as soon as I opened my eyes, and that everything I did between waking up and arriving at the office was in aid of my employer.

Now, thankfully, blissfully, I can mostly do things in my own time, but that has only heightened my distaste of forcing my day into a schedule. I am okay with an appointment or two (which is good, since my job literally involves meeting with people) but I’m over trying to get up or be at my desk, finish work, make dinner by the clock.

At the same time as I was learning about Bread Time, it was around the solstice and I posted two posts about the Solstice to Instagram:

Half past noon, two days before Solstice and the sun is barely clearing the buildings. It feels like bedtime around four, and by 9:30 you feel like you’ve been up all night.

How amazing, and how unlikely, to live on this funny little planet with its funny little tilt which gives us solstices and seasons and weather, and so festivals and feasts. Things to look forward to, things to plan for, and a promise, an absolute guarantee that longer, warmer days will come.

and

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve really appreciated the solstice. It’s kind of a nothing holiday, really, unless you decide to make a big deal of it. (Which is funny, because it’s actually less invented than most holidays.)

But the thing is, the day before Winter Solstice is cold and dark, and the day after Winter Solstice is cold and dark. It’s not even the middle of winter - nowhere near. We still have months of cold and grey ahead of us.

It turns out that the reason the shortest day isn’t the coldest day is that the land and the water and the air still holds some heat from summer. There’s a lag between the effect of the direct heat of the Sun — or its absence — and the temperature of the Earth, because there’s just so much matter here. It’s the same in summer — June 21 is the longest day but it doesn’t get really hot until July and August because it takes that long for the land to soak up the heat of the sun.

So this year I’m using that as a reminder that things take time. That all the efforts we put in sometimes take a while to show an effect because we are dealing with such massive elements.

And that allowing of things to take time, I realized, is Bread Time again.

Attention

Do you see what they have in common, bread and the tilt of the whole planet? It’s the natural world.

Bread Time is about yeast and temperature and flour and water. The Solstice and the seasons are about the light of the sun and the slow warming and cooling of tremendous masses of water and air and land. Things we can’t control — we can only observe and respond to and respect.

The key to Bread Time is attention. In making bread, you pay attention to how the yeast responds when you proof it, and how the dough rises. Clock time is meaningless in making bread; if the dough hasn’t risen to the right size and texture, it’s not ready to bake. So you have to use your eyes and your fingers and your nose, your experience and your intuition.

The idea of attention, to myself, to the people I love, to my work, and to the natural world, kept coming up as a I thought about the year ahead, Bread Time, and joy.

But I’ve been thinking about the power of attention since I read How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Attention is my work: so much of coaching is attending to the words people use, to their physicality and tone of voice. To what they don’t say.

Attention is also key to knowing the world as it really is, not as you assume it is or think it should be. Likewise, it’s key to knowing yourself as you really are, not as you think you should be. My understanding of and respect for attention only continues to grow.

Bread Time in real life

Bread Time in real life is about respecting myself as part of nature, as an organism with varying levels of energy and needs and abilities that vary with the time of day and time of year. Sometimes I wake up early, with a lot of energy, and sometimes I don’t, and it’s trying to get myself to behave the same all year round will only lead to misery.

Bread Time means paying attention to my body, which I’ve written about before. Specifically I wrote about not being very good at it, so this year will bring lots of opportunities to practice.

Bread Time in real life also means reassuring myself that things happen in their own time, and that being anxious about results, or giving up on things too soon because they’re not working out is not the way. It means trusting that if I keep doing my best, things will happen. (They might not be the things I expected, but at least they will be interesting.)

Ease

The result of this allowing of things to take the time they need is — I hope — ease. So much of my anxiety has to do with feeling behind: behind in work, behind in housework, behind in life. My to do list constantly outpaces my capacity to do things, and while I’m always working to pare down my obligations, I don’t think I’ll ever have so few responsibilities that I will run out of things to do.

And in fact, I wouldn’t want to — I love doing things. I love being part of collective projects, and setting goals for myself and making change in my life and the world. The answer to my anxiety about feeling behind is not to strip myself of all ambition.

I think the answer might be Bread Time — to allow things to take the time that they take. To allow myself to have slow days and only get one thing done, or no things at all. And to trust that change will happen regardless.

Joy in the middle

I chose Joy as my word for the year, but the words attention and ease kept coming up too. And joy is part of the triad of connection, engagement and joy that I’m aiming for in life and in business.

And so my intentions for 2022 became a four-pointed star with joy in the middle.

           ease
             |
community — Joy — engagement
             |
          attention

What about you? Do you have a word for the year? Are there other words jostling for attention?

Coda

I had trouble writing this post. It feels muddled. There are a lot of ideas here, about attention and bread and nature, ease and leisure and anxiety, community and trust, and although I didn’t type them out, ideas about colonialism and capitalism and science. It’s all interconnected in lots of different ways, only very few of which I’ve written out here. I feel like I just threw a lot of stuff out without making sense of it.

But I’m also realizing that that’s the glory of taking a year to think about something. It’s January — of course I don’t really know how all this works. That’s why I’m thinking about it all year.

Second Coda

One way my trouble writing this post manifested was in procrastination and avoidance, which leads to the question: Is that Bread Time? Does yeast procrastinate?

(I have to think, no.)

But is procrastination actually a reasonable analogue to, say, the slowness with which yeast works at lower temperatures. Is my procrastination a part of the natural world, to be accepted and embraced? Or is it a flaw to be deplored and corrected?

Is the business of judging what’s “good” slowness and what isn’t a useful application of Bread Time? I think in the spirit of experimentation I might try self-compassion, which I was reminded of while procrastinating.

Self-compassion says to acknowledge your struggle (“I’m procrastinating because this post is frustrating and feels unsuccessful”), recognize that it is not unique (“lots of writers procrastinate”), and speak to yourself kindly, as if to a friend (“don’t beat yourself up about it, you’re doing okay”).

Self-compassion seems like a good companion to Bread Time, as it also has to do with embracing the way things are, rather than the way we think they’re supposed to be.