Feel your way through 2024

Embrace goal-setting that makes space for emergence and change.

My family and I spent the past week in the mountains, hiking and skiing. On new years eve it snowed, and we woke up to a landscape smooth with fresh snow, trees graced with white highlights and a a wide open blue sky.

We hit the ski slopes and as I stood at the top ready to start, my word of the year arrived: Freedom.

Starting the new year with a word that indicates how I’d like to feel as I go ahead has become a practice that’s enabled me to adapt to the uncertainties, opportunities and emerging possibilities that life presents.

It’s helped me stop judging myself for goals that get dropped, and find clarity in my decision-making.

How it started

About five years ago a dear friend gave me a bag of cards with single words on them. Each day I’d draw one to reflect on through the day. Sometimes I’d completely forget about it, only to remember in the evening and reflect on how starting the day with a prompt on “abundance” or “longing” had influenced my day, my choices and mindset.

When New Years Day came around, inspired by the cards, I decided to find one word to carry with me through the year, rather than go through my new years resolution goal-setting.