18/08/2026
Back in January, everyone was very excited about 2026 being the Year of the Horse. The Chinese zodiac promised us fire, momentum, boldness and the energy to charge forward. We were all supposed to feel strong and unstoppable. This was going to be the year things finally got DONE. Horse-power! KAPOW!
It has not been the Year of the Horse.
It has been, at best, the Year of the Donkey with Three Legs, doing its absolute best on a very pot-holed road
The honest answer to "what happened" is pretty heavy and really quite rubbish. The news. The economy. Iran. Gaza, still. The creep of Reform. The weather behaving in ways that suggest the planet has had enough of us. The rise of AI, which feels dystopian.Put it all together and there's this general sense that the world feels very uncertain right now, and there's not much to do about any of it except scroll, worry, and make another cup of tea.
My clients are tired. My friends are tired. I am tired. The cat next door looks tired and it sleeps 17 hours a day. And it's not the kind of sleep that a good night's sleep fixes. It's the accumulated kind. The world has been a lot, for quite a long time now. Most of us haven't had a long enough run of ordinary before something else happens. And I don't think it's just the big stuff. I think a lot of us are also tired of waiting: for things to settle, for life to feel a bit more like ours again.
And I want to say, before anything else, that this is allowed. Being tired is allowed. You haven't fallen behind, you haven't wasted the year. You're responding completely reasonably to a genuinely strange and heavy time. There's nothing wrong with you.
The thing about a hard year is that it tends to take up all the available space. It doesn't mean the good stuff didn't happen, it just means it got drowned out, and trying to recall it all is frankly the last thing you feel like doing when you're tired. But I sat down and had a good think about it anyway.
Anyway, what I keep coming back to is this. A lot of us have decided we'll get back to our actual lives once things settle down. Once the news is less relentless. Once Nigel Farage stops finding new and creative ways to be dangerous and insufferable. And I understand why. But if we wait to feel better before we begin, we might be waiting a very long time.
You don't have to feel better to begin. I've started things when I really wasn't in the mood and they've turned out better than I expected. Waiting for certainty is just another way of staying stuck. So pick the one small thing: the conversation you've been putting off, the idea you keep coming back to, the thing you said you'd do when life felt less mad, the PT session you keep meaning to book.
Keep it small. Keep it manageable. There's still time…
So, what's one small thing that feels doable for you?
