What New Year's Resolution Underpins All The Others?
A foundation to build on in 2025...
Dear friends,
Today's newsletter is a brief reflection on the unique space between years.
Inside:
Exploring the resolution that underpins all the others.
The paradox of growth: breaking to rebuild.
Challenging the need to be productive to feel we've earned the right to exist.
Read Time: 4 minutes
What Resolution Underpins All The Others?
There are times you can’t get back to you.
When your voice is dispersed amidst the many competing voices, in and out.
Where am I?
In the extremes, we feel fragmented and exposed to the danger within us.
Because it is dangerous work — to dare to look inside.
What will you see?
One of the paradoxes of living is that we all fall into traps.
Some are of our own making.
Others feel as if pre-determined, lodged in us through ancient cycles.
Family lineages carry unseen weights which pass down through the generations.
To break them, you often have to break yourself first.
Isn’t that a paradox?
That deconstruction precedes healing.
Sometimes, to reconstruct, the kaleidoscope has first to shatter.
What, must I be shattered too?
The terror in these moments is that there will be nothing after the breakdown.
Yet the components of you do remain — they just await a new unified form.
You don’t have to shatter where you come from, either.
Rather, the opportunity is renewing your relationship to:
Your lineage
Your unwritten potential.
These two always exist in a certain tension.
Arrival in adulthood is learning to hold that tension.
You must become who you are.
While carrying the traditions, too.
We feel trapped because giving too much to one cuts us off from the other.
To balance this tension — suspended between past and future — requires continuous effort.
“To be modern is to live a life of constant change, not in an imaginary world free from the past, but in a real one in which we are deeply rooted in the traditions we are constantly transforming.”
— Marshall Berman
If you follow your bliss, you risk severing ties with all that came before, like an astronaut floating adrift, untethered from his spacecraft.
Embrace the ancestral burden, and that potential always lies beneath a threshold, like a seal beneath the ice, looking for an air hole.
Answering these questions is a lifelong journey — one that’s not ours alone.
What we make of ourselves will be passed along, and without doubt, imperfectly, too.
Reflections as 2025 Looms
I reflect on this because, as 2025 looms, many of us fall into two camps regarding whether to make resolutions.
Either we write them, subconsciously believing that pursuing a million things will somehow grant us the right to exist.
Or we reject them altogether, subconsciously aware that we’ll make no impact on our current trajectory unless we change something.
Here’s an alternate approach:
Write down both the things you will do and the things you will not do.
We repress by overloading ourselves with busyness — a classic defence mechanism that keeps us from hearing our internal voice.
To hear yourself, you must first learn to listen.
You will never do that unless you create space for the listening itself.
Our society’s obsession with doing means that even when we’re idle, we still think about what we should be doing.
Over Christmas, it’s easier to let go because the rest of society has coordinated itself to this same task.
However, for most of the year — when the world never switches off — it helps to work on switching off as a practice.
One way we can help ourselves is to factor in where, when and how we have off time.
Give this to yourself as a conscious gift.
“Now I am going to loaf.”
- Larry in “The Razor’s Edge”
It's a counter-cultural idea, but as important as your resolutions is what you choose not to do.
Today, I will unwind because I choose to do it!
Walk for the sake of walking.
Read the book in the cafe for the chance of stumbling across the idea that inspires you.
Say, tonight I will let go into the madness because to the madness I am called.
I am excited for 2025.
For me, that’s enough already.
My First Resolution: The Foundation of All Others
My first resolution is the resolution which underpins all the others.
It is about continuing my journey of recent years —
To be ever more in life.
Yes, there’s stuff I want to do — for a start, what to do with my new songs!
However, what precedes this is the recognition that doing doesn’t make you more in life — it can have the opposite effect.
For instance, the new songs have come mainly from a decision to do less.
Yes, you can practise. Yes, you can write lyrics and assimilate ideas.
But before all this you have to give yourself over to the space from where something will emerge first.
"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again."
— Joseph Campbell
The hardest part of writing my new songs was to commit myself to negative space.
I don’t mean to a spirit of negativity — of course not!
I mean to the commitment to time during which I could listen — really listen and really hear — what was going on inside me.
My writer's block at the beginning of the year was partly because I was struggling to let go of the idea that what I did had to have a pragmatic purpose.
I was trying to write songs to show myself I could write songs.
They were all crap and I knew it.
It was only after I gave myself over to being in my space that songs started coming.
You get to the song by not chasing the song.
They came after rediscovering the joy of being in a creative space for its own sake — and understanding that I didn’t have to create anything.
I rediscovered the spirit of play.
The spirit of play encouraged all that I was feeling to express itself.
I wondered if it wasn’t dissimilar to what Jung felt after breaking from Freud, finding his way back from his breakdown by playing with his childhood figurines.
What interested me was the extent to which I had to reject so much of what the modern world asks of us to get to these songs.
We all have a spirit world — where our creative life exists.
And yet, we fail to recognise that our obsession with doing obstructs access to what makes us most of us.
While tied to Freud, Jung was trapped in the temporal world—wearing another’s coat, seeking his and society’s approval.
In breaking away, he endured a profound psychological upheaval as everything he believed defined him fell apart.
The paradox is that it was only after the crumbling — after having the courage to crumble — that he gained access to the ideas he is remembered for today.
The Importance of a Protected Space
My reflection is that in life, we can be here but not here, like crowds chasing Pokemon through their phones.
Having a protected space becomes, therefore, a pivotal modern enterprise.
For me, it restores my perspective, especially when hurt, upset or confused.
Ah, yes, there’s the miracle!
Recognising the miracle itself — the opportunity of life, its absurdity, its defiance, its wonder and its unlikeliness — is what returns me to me.
In those moments, I touch upon my own living potential again.
Sometimes, a song pops out, too.
In this space, I see two things:
First, a renewed appreciation of life.
Second, if there is something I’m doing which feels counter to the life I really want to lead.
Its sum?
Recognising that touching that living potential is purpose in itself.
After that, what you do is just an extension of that experience.
Important — but not the thing itself.
Rather; it’s embodiment.
The song is the feeling, frozen.
Too often, we manically do things to prove that we have the right to exist, whether to ourselves or others.
Touching your potential safeguards the right purpose.
Yes, what I’m doing feels right for me at this time.
That’s enough.
You get to exist.
You don’t have to prove it — to yourself or others.
To be alive in the living of it — that’s purpose in itself.
That’s a foundation on which to build your resolutions.
THANK YOU!
Thank you all for the support and encouragement this year!
Each reply I’ve received has meant so much to me — and helped me think about the newsletter and the ideas I’ve chosen to explore.
One of my hopes this year was to deepen my community where I live and to open more to others online.
Getting to know some of you from our emails has been one of the privileges of my year. Please keep them coming!
I’m wishing you all love and luck in the year ahead.
There’s a page to turn and a journey to continue.
Wherever this finds you, please remember:
There’s good stuff out there for you.
With love, thanks and a stretchy post-Christmas belly!
Jim
p.s
I will be sharing my creative journal as a separate newsletter here.
Creative Journal 2025