12/31/2020
**Note: So, I'm foregoing my annual New Year's live broadcast this year. Here's the email I sent to people instead, which hopefully is helpful in some way. If you hate missing gems like these, head over to jimhjort.com and join the email list! And happy new year!**
I miss spending New Year’s Eve how I used to. You can see it in the (grainy) picture below.
It was a ceremony I would attend every year, where, if you chose to, you could express your intention for the year—not a cold New Year’s resolution, but a compass point you wanted to navigate by—out loud, to the quiet assembled group. You’d light a little tea light candle, and then the next person would speak.
As a percentage of the population, there aren’t many people like me (and perhaps you), who would consider spending NYE this way. But there are enough that when they come together, they can light up a little sphere of mutual influence with the soft light of hope.
We’d meditate together afterward as the clock struck twelve, in silence and stillness while others rang in the New Year with firecrackers and pistols in the back alley. That’s a mindful New Year’s Eve in LA.
Alas, scandal shut the organization down entirely a few years ago, and the individuals represented by those points of light pretty much scattered to the four winds. It feels colder without so many nearby lights, I must say.
**Letting the Light Out**
The Buddha recommended being a light unto ourselves, so if you put any stock in that, then maybe 2020 yanking the rug out from under our feet was a blessing.
You had to regain your balance somehow. And if you’re reading this, you were successful at that, even if you don’t feel particularly balanced. You compensated for the massive shift you experienced.
An important question: did you respond to the tumult of this year with consumption or production? Or a combination of the two?
Consumption is an effort to soothe your experience of a difficult reality with bringing something outside of you, inside. Think alcohol, sweets, or binge-watching TV.
Production is responding to inner turmoil by letting parts of you out to play, like letting a puppy wear itself out so you can sleep. Think learning to play guitar, restoring a rusty axe, or making crepes.
I’m not here to pass judgment. It’s just something to consider.
But note that the space within you is finite, and can get cramped and airless quickly. The space outside of you is boundless, as is your capacity to enjoy exploring it.
**A Little Self-Disclosure**
For me, it was a combination. I’m a film buff, and did consume lots of movies from my watchlist this year. But I managed to avoid my biggest landmine (massive food consumption) and actually lost weight. I guess that’s what happens when you eat food from outside your home only five—yes, five!—times in an entire year.
But mostly, I produced. You may have joined me for my Facebook Live months ago, with tips for coping with COVID anxiety. But you probably didn’t.
Attendance wasn’t that great, and I think people were already hunkered down into survival mode, hoarding toilet paper and such, by then.
I’ve been developing new programming since then. I also felt called to join institutional frontline healthcare workers, so I spent some months at a local medical center working with people who, on top of everything else this year, were diagnosed with cancer.
Exercising those core parts of myself felt good. Whatever glow I had inside of me, I was able to extend it a little bit further out.
**What I Would Have Told You**
This will be the first year in several that I will not be doing a New Year’s weekend live broadcast to help you strategize. I just don’t know that people are ready yet to look past the calendar year, when we’re still in the midst of very difficult times.
So, as of now, I’m thinking that I might do that kind of broadcast in the springtime.
If I were going live this weekend, though, I would tell you to please be kind and forgiving of yourself, no matter what you did or didn’t do in 2020.
Whatever you did was the best you were capable of doing at a time in which, whether you were fully conscious of it or not, your coping resources were tested to the max.
That also means: take it easy with what you expect of yourself right now for 2021.
I’d encourage you to do as much production as you can, in the sense that I was just talking about it. Open a window so that parts of you that have been locked down this year—metaphorically if not physically—have room to move and breathe.
Do things that are gratifying to do for their own sake, because they connect to a value you hold dear, give you a feeling that’s bigger than mere pleasure, or help you embody a quality that you treasure. (Considering what qualities you admire in others is a good place to start.)
Let your success be measured by the depth of gratification you feel on the inside, and the outcomes of your efforts will take care of themselves, I promise. It’s a win-win.
So, in short: intangible over tangible. Intention-setting, not resolution-making. Production through expression.
With that, I will return you to your New Year’s Eve (or, if I’m too late for where you live, Happy New Year!), and I will be in touch again soon.
In the new year, may you be free from suffering and enjoy a heart full of compassion for yourself and others.🙏
