How to Reset
I can still feel the warmth of last year's New Year's celebration in Sydney, standing by the harbour with my partner and our parents, watching fireworks bloom over the bridge. The year stretched ahead of me then, full of promise and possibility. Now, as this year draws to a close, I find myself blinking in surprise at how quickly it all went by.
What I'm realizing is that sense of aliveness I felt in Sydney had less to do with what lay ahead than with how I had chosen to close the previous year. I had done the work of making peace with what was, and that clearing created space for what could be.
For the past decade, I've practiced an annual ritual of bringing closure to the year. It's become as essential to me as exhaling, this practice of slowing down long enough to actually notice what happened. Not what I hoped would happen or wished had happened, but what actually was.
There's an image that keeps returning to me. When I'm driving fast on a highway, the signs blur past. I can barely read them. The landscape becomes a streak of color and motion. But when I slow down, everything sharpens into focus. I can read the exit signs. I can notice the trees. I can decide if I want to turn.
And that's what this time of year really is. A slowing down so I can read the signs of my own life. A pause so I can decide if I want to make any turns.
I think of it as an inner harvest. All year, I've been planting seeds without always knowing what would grow. Some intentions sprouted and flourished. Others never broke through the soil. This is the time to gather what actually grew, to acknowledge the full crop of the year.
A year ago in Sydney, I had so many intentions. Many dreams and desires for what this year could bring. Some of them manifested in ways that surprised me. Many of them didn't happen at all. And sitting with that reality, with both the fulfilled and unfulfilled, has been its own kind of work.
What I've noticed is that it's easy to hang on to disappointments. The losses, the discomforts, the ways things didn't go as planned. They stick to me like a moth, catching on my clothes as I try to move forward. The human mind seems almost programmed to grip tightly to what went "wrong".
Each new year offers a blank slate, a fresh start. But if I haven't made peace with the past, I don't start clean at all. I carry forward all that baggage, all those unfulfilled dreams and lingering disappointments. They colour everything that comes next.
My process has become almost ritualistic in its simplicity. Yesterday alone, I called three different friends just to ask them about their year. How did it feel? What were they grateful for? What disappointed them? There's something powerful about speaking these things out loud, about getting it all on the table where I can see it.
I've been journaling every day, asking myself the same questions. But what I'm most excited about is the archaeology of it all. Reading back through my journals and notes. Looking at my calendar, month by month. Scrolling through the photos on my phone, each one a small window into a moment I lived.
This is how I recount and retell the year to myself. Not as I wished it had been, but as it actually was. The good days and the terrible ones. The moments of joy and the stretches of disappointment. All of it, the full spectrum of the human experience.
Years ago, I learned a sleep meditation that has stayed with me. The practice is simple: while lying in bed at the end of the day, I watch my day in fast-forward like a movie. From waking up to brushing my teeth to breakfast to checking email to conversations with my partner to tidying the house to work to lunch with a friend to the gym. Every mundane moment, every small interaction.
The act of mentally reviewing the entire day allows my mind to process it, to make peace with it. The day doesn't have to have been amazing. It could have been awful. The point isn't to judge it but to acknowledge it, to let it settle.
When I do this, I fall asleep more easily. My mind is at peace because it has been witnessed. Nothing is left hanging, unprocessed, demanding attention in the dark.
That's what I'm doing now, but expanded to the scale of an entire year. Over the next ten days, I'm giving myself the space to really focus on making peace with what was. With what happened and what didn't. With who I was at the start of the year and who I've become.
How it happens feels less important than the fact that it happens. Some people might do this through long walks or conversations or creative projects. The method matters less than the intention.
This practice of making peace with the past is what makes space for the future to arrive, unencumbered by what I'm still carrying.
And there's a pleasure in it I didn't expect when I first started this ritual a decade ago. A kind of tenderness toward myself and the year I've lived. Not everything worked out, but I showed up. I tried. I lived through all of it.
That's worth acknowledging. That's worth making peace with.
And that is how I learned to reset.
