happy new year!🚀... now what?

One indelible insight from last year was that it only takes a few seconds for a life to change irreversibly. One minute things are settled and reliable the next, we’re standing on completely strange ground needing to find a new way of becoming.

Likewise, the timing of January catalyzes our instinct to disavow stagnation, break with old patterns, and reconfigure ourselves for a new course of life.

This is the nature of January, named for Janus, the Roman guardian of doorways, gates, and transitions. He is famously depicted with two faces—one looking backward, the other forward.

Because our lives are shaped by what we choose to let go and what we choose to carry forward, Janus gives us a powerful framework for setting a new course. We too must hold both the past and future at once.

Making resolutions pales in comparison to having the courage and vulnerability it takes to honor what has been—where our limits were tested, and suss out latent beginnings.

With one foot in what has been, we leave some burdens to the past and with the other, we recalibrate ourselves in what is becoming—thus crossing January’s threshold with sagacity and discernment.

For better or worse, we carry our past experiences in our bodies and sometimes on our skin. So it pays to tame the instinct to rush past life’s thresholds headlong. 

In the words of Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donahue, “risk may be our greatest asset.” So dare to look both ways before you cross.

May we trust in the possibility of what 2026 new threshold offers, especially the growth and gifts within us.