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Goals, Intentions and Word Of The Year 2021

JANUARY 1, 2021

This new year is different. This new year there is not the clean break to “start again” that other years have. Of course this is always the case; the ticking over of a digit at the end of the year denotes nothing but our human need to control and measure time. Usually we manage to kid ourselves that the ticking over is meaningful, that it can birth us anew into a whole different world – but this year, with ongoing lockdowns and vaccine rollouts and continuing deaths around the world, it is harder to feel the change in the air.

I didn’t meant for this post to start off quite so depressing. Amongst it all, always, are reasons for optimism and hope – the very fact that there are vaccines rolling out, that people are continuing to keep their communities safe, for instance. I suppose what I’m saying is, it feels pretty darn arbitrary to be setting goals right now. 2020 showed us how laughably easy it is for your precious goals and dreams to be swept away by a torrent of circumstance and doomscrolling. There is so much that seems more important than our little goals, and in this limbo it feels a little pointless to set goals we have no idea we’ll be able to work on or not.

However, there is a point. The point is, it makes me feel better.

I like to set goals and make plans; planning is essentially my hobby. I like to feel like I am carving out agency in my life and make decisions on where it goes. I like to have a destination to point myself towards. I like to dream and have ideas and see how I could make something work. So I’m still setting my word, deciding some goals, focusing on some intentions – although they are a little more open-ended this year.

Aside from the dystopian backdrop of the pandemic, in my personal life I am also carrying a lot of uncertainty. I don’t even know where I’m going to live after January. So I’m not making a whole lot of SMART goals this year, because how can one decide what’s specific and measurable and relevant right now? Instead, my goals are mostly practices and promises – joyful things I want to have more of every day and things I want to do for myself. I can’t help but think this is a better kind of goal-setting for even the best of years..

Word Of The Year 2021

Light

I think I knew this was my word back at the end of November. I played around with a few others, but it always came back to Light. Last year my word (Powerful) was a general feeling I wanted to embody, but with Light I have four specific focuses:

Seeing Light – in a year where I know I will have personal challenges and some dark times to navigate, I want to always, in the words of Morgan Harper Nichols, “look for where the light gets in”. See the light in situations and face towards the sun.

Being Light – I am a person of the earth and have a tendency to ground myself so deeply that I become immovable like a tree. I hold onto things for too long, physically and emotionally. So I want to remind myself to be light, to not shoulder too much or plant myself too heavily. I think about being a kite: still connected to earth but free to roam whichever breeze I choose.

Feeling Light – there has been heaviness in 2020, and there will be heaviness in 2021. That unease in your chest, like the agitation of knowing you’ve forgotten something important or the dread of a funeral in the morning. While I won’t always be able to avoid the heaviness, I want to give myself opportunities to feel light, to shift the anvil with some sunshine.

Emanating Light – I did not show up in my business and the world in the way I would like in 2020. Not beating myself up about it, I had a lot going on, but in 2021 I will need community and my work more than ever – so I want this to be a reminder to show up with lightness and work that I’m proud of.