A different kind of year-end review
Inspired by the Winter Solstice, a contemplation for the year that's passed.
There’s a distinct kind of dissonance that I often feel during the month of December.
My body craves rest and stillness; time to reflect on and integrate the year that’s ending. Mentally, I’m ready to disengage from work and endless life admin tasks, and I crave creative space and time for contemplation before diving into new projects in January. But it’s also the busiest (and least spacious) time of year, filled with final client deadlines, year-end organizational and administrative tasks, holiday travel logistics and social commitments.
I know I’m not the only one who tends to feel “off” at this time of year.
In nature, it’s the Winter Solstice—the darkest day of the year, and traditionally, a time for going inward, for rest and reflection. In the absence of light and warmth, we embrace silence and stillness. Bears are hibernating. Trees are bare. It’s the dormant time of nature’s growth cycle.
But in the modern world, it’s the holiday frenzy and the Q4 crunch. In our productivity-obsessed, death-denying culture, there’s little room for sitting in the darkness and embracing our own periods of rest and dormancy. Instead, the holiday season is filled with packed schedules, year-ahead planning, artificial lighting, and often, artificial cheer.
If we do manage to find time for reflection, many of us do it in the form of annual life audits of “year-in-review” coaching exercises—looking back and analyzing what’s been going well and what hasn’t, and setting our targets for the year ahead.
One such “annual review” has been sitting at the top of my to-do list for the past couple weeks. I briefly began the process of scanning back over the important moments of 2024, but I’ll be honest, it was feeling like a bit of a slog. And after getting knocked out with a terrible cold for over a week—in the same week that I received some disappointing news and was dealing with a difficult family situation—I ended up doing a rather different kind of reflection on the year that’s passed.
Lacking the energy for all but the most urgent tasks, I had no choice but to give up productivity and planning, and to give my body what it actually needed. I ended up reflecting on 2024 not by analyzing my own wins, lessons, growth and life themes, but instead, by physically and emotionally processing the residual emotions of what was ultimately a more challenging year. Along with some incredible milestones and moments of joy, 2024 brought plenty of stops and starts, old issues resurfacing, and things not going as hoped or planned.
Being sick and exhausted forced me to slow down and feel the heavier feelings I hadn’t fully made space for throughout the year: loss, disappointment, sadness, grief.
It’s been a humbling reminder of the non-linear nature of the grieving process, and the way loss can completely redirect our lives. 2024, in many ways, felt like a circling back to the losses I experienced in 2019 and 2020. Facing a new layer of change and transitions, I was brought to the humbling realization of how much I’m still reeling from the sudden deaths of my father and my brother almost five years ago. Facing change and growing pains in several areas of my life seemed to trigger and reawaken that first great loss—the death of my father.
I’ve come to think of experiencing loss as less of a detour and more like a train switching tracks. We get off the track we’ve been on and shift to a new one—and we don’t know where it’s taking us. We’ve lost our former sense of predictability and control, and we must surrender to the uncertainty of a journey that’s unfolding moment to moment towards a destination that is as yet unknown.
For years after losing my dad and my brother, I wanted (and tried) desperately to “get back on my path.” But over time I realized that there would be no going back. There would be forward movement, but in a new direction, living a different life. That new life has brought many beautiful gifts, along with a pain that never quite goes away.
Being in the dark, calling back the light
In many indigenous cultures, ceremonies were held on the Solstice to honor the presence of the darkness, and to welcome the light back in. On the longest night of the year, dancers and rituals were performed and prayers were offered, asking the light to come back—and celebrating its return.
These darkest, quietest days of the year are an invitation to go inward and tend to whatever it is that we find there: grief, rage, disappointment, unfulfilled desires, fears, emptiness. Which isn’t an easy thing to do in the cramped window between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
This emotional inventory and processing offers us a different kind of year-end review: more instinctive and embodied, less intellectual and transactional. Rather than using our thinking mind to assess the year’s events, we allow our bodies to guide us towards what needs to looked at and tended to. This is what contemplation is about: not trying to find the answers, but simply being with the questions, the things that are unresolved.
Because only when we really stop and process the unresolved emotions of the year that’s passed can they become the compost and fertilizer for new growth in the year ahead. For those of us who have experienced loss, this is a particularly powerful practice. And without even trying to “look on the bright side,” creating space for our grief also has a way of reminding us of the good’s still there.
And as nature reminds us, the light always returns. After the darkest night of the year, the days start getting longer. The light returns—every time.
For those of us who are grieving, or whose year brought challenges: This Solstice, in the midst of the holiday rush, can we stop and sit with what has been lost? Knowing that the end of 2024 brings us another year closer to death, can we appreciate whatever it is that the year brought? Are we ready to invite the light back in?
Wishing you a peaceful and illuminating holiday season…
Carolyn