How to let a year die

Giving our bodies space to process the emotions of a year gone by.

This piece was originally published last December, when there were about 1,700 of you here. There are now over 7,000 of us in the Hello, Mortal community, which feels both wild and deeply humbling.

As we approach the Winter Solstice—the longest night and shortest day of the year—we wanted to bring this reflection back, especially for those who are exhausted, grieving, had a difficult year, or just not feeling very productive right now.

And just a heads up, we’ll be taking a short break after this and will be back in your inbox on January 11 with a new piece. Happy holidays to all.

Photo by Victoria Tyur on Unsplash

There’s a distinct kind of dissonance that I often feel during the month of December.

My body craves rest and stillness; time to process and integrate the year that’s ending. Mentally, I’m ready to disengage from work and endless life admin tasks, and I crave time and space for contemplation before diving into new projects in January. But it’s also generally the busiest (and least spacious) time of year, filled with final client deadlines and year-end to-dos, plus holiday planning, 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, there is silence and stillness. Bears are hibernating. Trees are bare. It’s the dormant time of nature’s growth cycle.

But for most of us, it’s the holiday frenzy and the Q4 crunch. In our productivity-obsessed, death-denying culture, we’re not very comfortable stopping, getting quiet and noticing what arises in the stillness. Instead, our days are packed and frenzied.

If we do take time to reflect, it’s often in the form of annual life audits or “year-in-review” coaching exercises—the kind that are all over social media this time of year—looking back to assess what worked, what didn’t, and what we want to focus on in the year ahead.

I started one of these annual reviews myself, and I’ll be honest: it felt like a slog. Engaging in an intellectual analysis of the key moments and insights of the year was just not what I needed.

What I needed was to slow down enough for my body to process the lingering emotions and losses of the year—to allow the cycle to end, to die, so I didn’t have to carry them into the new year.

This became its own form of death contemplation: sitting still, noticing what arose in the stillness, and allowing the year to end on a visceral, embodied level.

It was unexpectedly healing, and it may become a ritual I return to every December.

Letting the body lead

Initially, this practice was less of a choice and more of a necessity.

After getting knocked out with a terrible cold for over a week—in the same week that I was dealing with a difficult family situation—I simply didn’t have it in me to add anything unecessary to my plate.

Lacking the energy for all but the most urgent tasks, I had no choice but to give up productivity and planning, cancel plans, and to give my body what it actually needed: quiet and rest.

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 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.

I needed to fully acknowledge the reality of ongoing loss, and feel it in my body, to step into the holiday season with a brighter spirit.

Being in the dark, calling back the light

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.

And it’s this process that allows us to actually welcome in a fresh start in the New Year. Rather than analyzing with our intellects, feeling and releasing with our bodies.

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.

In many indigenous cultures, ceremonies were held on the Solstice to not only honor the presence of the darkness, but 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.

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. When we make space for death, we open up to new life—in this case, a new year and all its new possibilities.

P.S. We’re going on break for the holidays, so there will be no posts on 12/28 or 1/4—but we’ll be back on 1/11!

And as we head into this holiday season of gratitude, stress, and everything in between, we’d love to know what would be most useful for your death contemplation practice in the new year.

Your answers will help shape what we create next, so please respond to the poll, and feel free to reply to this email! We read every email we get.

Thank you and have a wonderful new year!