This is devastating in the amazing, competent way only you seem to manage, Museguided, yes, but also unsentimental, almost prosecutorial. You don’t console the reader; you subpoena them. And somehow make that feel like care.
You ask, finally, the only question that matters: What is one thing you can no longer pretend not to know?
For me, reading this, it was this: that I have been using explanation as a substitute for choice. If I can narrate why something hasn’t happened, contextualise it, intellectualise it, give it a lineage, I don’t have to cross the uglier threshold of deciding. Your essay made it painfully clear that fluency is not the same as honesty, and insight is not the same as entry. I’ve been very articulate at the edge of my own life.
What I admire the most is how you refuse the usual December binaries—despair vs hope, collapse vs reinvention—and instead locate something colder and truer: pressure. Not motivation. Not inspiration. Compression. The sense that the year hasn’t failed us so much as stopped indulging our rehearsals. That line about imagined futures lining up as witnesses rather than accusers is exacting and original. You reframe regret as evidence. Evidence of attention misallocated.
And the Paris dusk, oh, how I miss my city, is a masterstroke… that December clarity is the anesthesia wearing off. Possibility sobers up. What’s left isn’t bleak; it’s precise. That precision, as you suggest, may be the only real kindness time offers.
This didn’t make me want to “do better”.
It made me want to stop pretending I don’t already know where the bargain has gone bad.
Which feels like exactly your point.
Tamara, thank you for a year in which I’ve grown and evolved beyond my imagination thanks to your essays!
Ohhh perfect, because you named the quietest trap of all: substituting explanation for commitment. That move is especially seductive for people who think clearly, speak well, and can trace causality with elegance. Narrative competence can become a hiding place. If you can explain why something hasn’t happened with enough nuance, you get to feel morally engaged without being existentially implicated. The story stands in for the step.
The fluency without entry is something I see as one of the most socially rewarded forms of non-action. We live in a culture that praises articulation so loudly that it forgets to ask what articulation is for. Explanation becomes a buffer zone… sophisticated enough to earn approval, safe enough to avoid the cost of choosing. And choice, unlike insight, closes doors. It leaves fingerprints. It creates consequences that cannot be revised with better language later.
I’m glad you noticed the pressure rather than the pep talk. Pressure is impersonal. It doesn’t cheer you on or shame you. It simply reduces margin. That reduction is clarifying because it strips away the luxury of rehearsal. When time stops indulging us, it’s only accurate. The year tightens the frame until what matters can no longer hide behind possibility.
And yes, the sobriety you describe matters more to me than any version of hope I could sell. Sobriety doesn’t promise improvement but it restores proportion. It tells you where the exchange stopped making sense, where you kept paying in thought, justification, patience, or self-understanding, while avoiding the one cost that couldn’t be deferred: deciding.
If my essay didn’t make you want to “do better”…. well… that’s a relief! :) Better is vague and endlessly postponable. Knowing where the bargain failed is concrete. It’s actionable without being theatrical. And it doesn’t require reinvention, only honesty sturdy enough to be lived with.
Thank you, ma chère Céline, for reading with such precision, and for meeting my ideas at the exact depth they were written from! Your attention is never neutral, it changes both sides.
The real thing being exposed in the December audit is the clash of desire against grandiosity. We have, both an unlimited capacity to want, and therefore remain unsatisfied, as well as unlimited optimism, or maybe delusion, that next year will be different. This recurrence stems from exactly what you pinpoint: the belief that time is linear and progressive, not cyclical. Inherent to the progressive paradigm is the presupposition that things must get better in some measurable way, otherwise you've failed or are stagnant. This completely contradicts our lived experience of never quite being satisfied; of always wanting more, yet remaining stuck in a loop of reactivity and unmet expectations. What's grandiose is our absolute certainty in linear time, and our expectation that next year will be the year we turn things around, despite "failing" to do so in every previous year.
I love your framing of touching your life instead of living it; organizing the book collection instead of reading it. This is why selling programs or memberships or seminars is so effective, and it's why people love to obsessively plan and resolve: it gives us the illusion of progress or productivity; it makes us feel closer to our goals without actually walking down the path, and it's psychologically comforting because every step forward is a step you will need to retread when you retreat, and we always love having the option to retreat.
December is the reckoning. It wouldn't be or shouldn't be if we could just recognize the cycle and not insist that we are on some linear path, where the choice is only advancement or retreat. We also should recognize the perpetual nature of desire, which is just as cyclical as time, with its seasonal nature depending on the ebb and flow of our appetites. Winter will come again; you will be hungry once again and this isn't a trap, but the pulsating proof of life. The year ends before we are ready because we are never ready; we are never satisfied.
Brilliant as always. A true holiday gift. Thank you, Tamara.
You sharpen something I deliberately left only half-lit, the danger isn’t desire itself, but our insistence on narrating desire as a problem to be solved rather than a force to be stewarded. Wanting doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means something is alive!!! The trouble begins when wanting collides with the fantasy that life should eventually arrive at a stable plateau of fulfillment, after which appetite politely retires.
I’m wary, though, of framing dissatisfaction as failure or as pathology. I think the deeper miscalculation lies in assuming satisfaction was ever meant to be permanent. Desire isn’t an error in the system but the system itself breathing. When we mistake recurrence for stagnation, we start treating ordinary human rhythms as personal incompetence. That’s when optimism tips into self-deception. Hope is not naïve, it’s unmoored from how people actually change, incrementally, unevenly, often sideways.
Your point about planning culture is crucial. Preparation has become a socially acceptable stand-in for courage. It soothes because it preserves reversibility. You can always revise a plan; you can’t revise a choice without consequences. The comfort comes from staying close enough to the edge to feel engaged while retaining the option to pull back. December disrupts that arrangement. It exposes how often we’ve mistaken proximity for participation.
Where I might push this further is here…. the cycle itself isn’t the issue, it’s our refusal to locate responsibility within it. Cycles contextualise agency. Hunger returning doesn’t mean you eat the same meal again. Winter repeating doesn’t mean you wear the same coat. Cyclic time still demands discernment. The reckoning isn’t that we want again, but how we respond to wanting once we recognise the pattern.
I agree with you, Andrew, we are never “ready” in the grand sense. But we are occasionally ready enough. Ready enough to stop calling deferral wisdom. Ready enough to admit when optionality has turned into evasion. Ready enough to act without the guarantee that this time will finally fix the recurring ache.
Thank you for reading so attentively, and for treating desire as evidence that something in us is still asking to be lived! Thank you for supporting me relentlessly for almost a year, especially in the beginning when you believed in my talent like no other!
I think it's simpler than that: I choose to jump or I don't. I step into the space I know exists, or I keep pretending there are five things I have to do first. Are there five things I *could* do? Yes. But jumping is the only way I'll ever know.
Hmmmmm yes… And you’re right to strip it down to that.
The “five things first” are not lies. Comforts, I would say. They give shape to hesitation without asking it to end. They feel responsible, even virtuous, because they promise preparation while preserving distance. But at some point, preparation stops being care and starts being choreography.
Jumping isn’t reckless here. It’s honest. It’s the moment when you stop asking for proof that the space will hold you and accept that proof only comes after contact. Nothing in your life that actually mattered began with full certainty. It began with the decision to step before you knew how it would land.
And here’s the part that often goes unsaid…. jumping doesn’t erase fear. It makes fear irrelevant. Once you move, fear becomes information instead of an obstacle. The body catches up. The mind adjusts. The story rewrites itself after the act, not before.
So yes, I agree, you jump, or you keep rehearsing the jump forever. There isn’t a third option that preserves both safety and truth.
Absolutely yes to what wrote here. *Especially* the part about fear. the older I get, the more I've realized that the fear never goes completely away. It's all about how you learn to live and move with the fear, or shrink yourself and stay in its shadow.
This piece blew my mind. So many things in it. And you nail the way I feel right now.
My only addition would be that the "gendered undertone" is ALSO for men. But in a different way. Experiencing unfinishedness as a personal failure is why 40,000 people a year commit suicide --the vast majority of them are are men. And why? Well - you just fight the idea but have to admit that you do realize the you just can not "be that thing" --that collection of persona's. Just can't push that rock up that damn hill.
What I would really like to ask you is: and this might mean a new piece of writing, but I would not presume, is the theme of "inhabiting" your life -- this recurs in the piece. In this. The Newton painting and the idea of failed inhabitation, the Satan observing but not inhabiting intimacy. That thread I would love you to put your laser on and explore.
What DOES it mean to truly inhabit one's life? And would it make a difference in the December audit cycle? Would it matter?
The tragedy is that we can't be happy. We do try. Everything in the month is an audit and indictment, a proctology exam of/in all the selves that I/we try to carry forward. Still, sadly, pathetically, annually, my sincerity, my good intentions, my notes to myself, my flagging self-discipline they are doomed, doomed to fail to live up to those marks. And for what?
So at the end of the day if one could possibly get over productivity culture, possibly surmount the Mountains of Should --what would actually "inhabiting" ones life without regret and self-judgment look like?
I've never disliked a season more than the Christmas season and I've been through 66 of them now through jobs, schools, marriages, children and etc.
Let me be blunt: I f****** hate Christmas. This is such an unhappy, unwelcome idea -- and to have (then, alsoat the same time) to be the dad, the partner, the friend, the whatever. I have to SIMULATE that I'm cheerful and I never think I can do it. But I survive it. Like a month at the dentist, and I'm always so happy when the season is in the rearview mirror. I can forget myself.
Anyhow, I'm a big fan of you and I just want to say thank you for spelling out so well what I at least am feeling at this very moment. The piece made me feel worse and better. Finally happy new year to you - and, as you know, 2026 is going to be the best yet!
You’re right to push back on the gendered point. Unfinishedness punishes men differently, but no less severely. For many men, it isn’t framed as overload but as insufficiency… the dawning recognition that the composite self they were meant to embody (provider, partner, father, moral centre, steady presence, upward trajectory) is structurally uninhabitable. And I’m not referring to laziness or moral failure, but the demands contradict one another. When that contradiction is internalised rather than named, it metastasises into shame. And shame, unlike sadness, isolates. That isolation is where the statistics you cite become tragically legible.
Inhabiting one’s life is not about happiness, coherence, or even self-acceptance. It’s… irreversibility. To inhabit is to allow choices to have consequences that can’t be endlessly revised, narrated away, or postponed. It means standing inside a life where your actions close off other versions, not heroically, not optimistically, but plainly. Most people don’t fear failure as much as they fear finality. Inhabitation introduces finality in small, cumulative ways.
That’s why figures like Newton or Satan are so haunting: they observe, analyse, understand but remain unentered. They know about truth without submitting to it. Observation without participation feels safe, but over time it hollows out meaning. Inhabitation, by contrast, accepts loss as the cost of reality. You don’t get to be everything , and the relief, if it comes at all, comes from no longer trying.
Would inhabiting your life end the December reckoning? No. But it would change its tone. The audit wouldn’t ask why you failed to become more, but whether you stayed present where you actually were. Regret doesn’t vanish, but it becomes specific rather than global. Self-judgement narrows, stops being a verdict on existence and becomes information about limits.
Your hatred of Christmas makes complete sense. This year I was not into Christmas at all. What you’re describing isn’t seasonal grumpiness; it’s the violence of enforced simulation. To be required to perform warmth while managing exhaustion, disappointment, obligation, and accumulated roles is not festive. Survival, in that context, is endurance under constraint. That you emerge relieved rather than redeemed says nothing damning about you; it says something honest about the month!!!
The fact that my essay made you feel worse and better tells me it didn’t lie to you. It didn’t anesthetise. It didn’t promise repair. It stayed with the pressure long enough for something real to surface.
Thank you for reading me with such force, and for bringing your full, unfiltered experience! You seem so alive! And that’s rare and amazing.
Tamara, you nailed it: “insufficiency.” Yep. I think: Here I am in later age and I have given my utmost to every domain of life (as a male) that I can/should invest myself in (family, work, creative, etc.) and yet why is it not enough? Why am I never enough? –that’s the haunting, shaming, voice of the inner assessor who’s waving a bony finger in my face ever December after finding the flaws in my 4th Quarter accounting. Indeed: I have been double dealing with two sets of books.
Also - I think you nailed it as well in drawing out the idea of what it means to truly inhabit one’s life. I went back and reread your piece with that in mind it’s clearer to me now.
Sometimes I wonder if my problem is just a toxic artifact of a uniquely “American” cultural obsession with self-actualization ---I mean, do Greek olive famers mope around torturing themselves emotionally that they should have gone into soybeans? I would surely hope not. In any case: “inhabitation” as you wrote, “accepts loss as the cost of reality.” What a line. Yikes: I’m not sure I can ever accept loss -or- reality. But that is surely the task at hand.
You’ve reminded me of the advice I gave my own daughters when they were young, which was: “You can have anything you want in life! but you can’t have everything you want in life.” As you can see, I’m good at handing out advice, but as far as inhabiting that advice? Well, not so much.
That word “insufficiency” is corrosive precisely because it survives evidence. You can give your best to the roles you were handed, meet the obligations, show up consistently, and still hear that inner assessor tapping the ledger with a skeletal finger, unimpressed. What makes that voice so hard to silence is that it borrows the language of responsibility. It doesn’t say you failed; it says you fell short. That distinction keeps the shame alive while remaining just plausible enough to feel deserved.
I like your image of keeping two sets of books. One ledger tracks effort, care, sacrifice. The other tracks fantasy, the unlived surplus, the imagined version of you who somehow managed to be boundless without cost. No real human can reconcile those accounts, but many men are taught they should. December simply performs the audit aloud.
Ohhhh yes, the American fixation on self-actualisation turns life into a permanent referendum on unrealised potential. The question isn’t “did you live?” but “did you maximise?” That frame all but guarantees disappointment because maximisation has no natural stopping point. I doubt very much that Greek olive farmers lie awake wondering whether they should have been soy magnates because their identities aren’t built around infinite possibility. They inhabit what is, rather than grieve what might have been indefinitely. I am Eastern European, we are the same.
The advice you gave your daughters is sound. And your difficulty living it doesn’t negate its truth; it reveals how hard it actually is. Wisdom is often easier to offer than to embody because embodiment requires relinquishing the fantasy of exception.
... and I think you have diagnosed very well what has been buggin me for years, and, while I will not make a standard "New Years' Resolution" to "Inhabit My Life" -- but this truth will be percolating throughout the year and beyond. Thanks again and best to you and your family!
Have you written anywhere about your writing/art curation process? I’m dying to know how you write such insanely brilliant things seemingly constantly!
Regardless, thank you for this, it was the perfect post I didn’t know I needed. I know people say that a lot but man, you are really something else! 🤍
I don’t wait for inspiration, and I don’t write from enthusiasm. I write from irritation, friction, or a question that won’t leave me alone. My essays usually begin as something unresolved that keeps interrupting my thinking while I’m doing other things… walking, reading, answering emails, noticing myself repeating a pattern I don’t care about anymore . When that interruption becomes persistent enough, I stop trying to silence it and let it dictate the direction of the work.
As for curation… hmmm I’m strict. I don’t share everything I write, and I don’t write to fill space. I only publish when the essay has cost me something: certainty, self-image, a comforting narrative. That cost is usually what readers feel as intensity or precision. It’s not brilliance, I wish it were :). It’s just a form of exposure without ornament.
Thank you, Samantha, for reading with such generosity, and for paying attention to details!
I guess what adds to that tension is that what is expected, trumpeted, lived socially doesn't actually fit the natural season. And we aren't some mind ideas, but natural beings. The trees, flowers, beings are not flourishing, not striving, not doing in December. But everything kind of withdraws. It's this saying of Camus "In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer". Thats what is propagated, yet to be honest it is unnatural. And then, when you find yourself much more like a tree, without leafs, energy withdrawing into the earth, some bled-out being simply there, you ask yourself- what's wrong with me? Well, nothing...maybe it is society and all those human glorious, supreme, performative concepts we overtake blindly that are alienated.
Ahhh you’re touching something fundamental here, and I’m glad you brought the natural world into the conversation because it exposes how distorted our expectations have become.
The problem is misalignment. December asks bodies to behave like machines (output, cheer, visibility) at the precise moment when everything organic is conserving, retreating, going underground. We’ve mistaken dormancy for dysfunction. When energy withdraws, we pathologise it instead of recognising it as intelligence. A tree without leaves isn’t failing. It’s preparing.
That Camus line is telling precisely because of how it’s been misused, especially on Instagram by people who haven never even opened one of his books. He wasn’t arguing for perpetual brightness; he was naming resilience that exists despite winter, not instead of it. Somewhere along the way, that inner summer got repackaged as a demand to stay radiant year-round, which turns a silent inner resource into a public performance. That’s coercion, and it has nothing to do with courage.
When you describe feeling bled-out, reduced to simply being, that doesn’t read as something gone wrong to me. It reads as a body finally refusing an unnatural script. The discomfort comes from the gap between lived rhythm and social fantasy. We have internalised ideals of constant flourishing that don’t belong to human organisms, then blame ourselves when we can’t live up to them.
I think December exposes a refusal to fake vitality. And that refusal can feel isolating when everything around you insists on gloss, momentum, and emotional productivity. But nothing in the natural world apologises for winter. It doesn’t justify itself. It waits.
Thank you, Karin, for articulating this so clearly! It reframes the unease as a sane response to a deeply unsympathetic cultural demand.
I have goosebumps Tamara, so yes… I know- for myself- that nothing’s wrong with respecting natural rythmns. Since quite a long time I stepped out as much as I can from that “human fantasies”. Too of that turning everything to a one-dimensional platitude ( I adore you for not doing that, it is such a refreshment).
It is a gone-wrong pressure of societies and systems of a species which came to the utterly stupid idea that we are superior, because of the necessity having our prefrontal cortex blown up in order to survive. I’ll write on that arrogance and mis-leaded concepts, it drives me mad, even if I am myself part of homo sapiens. I very much enjoy your sharpness!
That goosebump reaction tells me you’re not arguing this intellectually. In fact you’ve recognised it. And recognition always carries a physical signature before it becomes a position.
The problem isn’t abstraction itself; it’s abstraction that forgets the body and then judges the body for not complying. Once complexity gets flattened into slogans (resilience, growth, positivity, optimisation-by-another-name) something essential is lost: scale!!! Season. Limitation. We start confusing dominance with wisdom, acceleration with intelligence.
Your point about the prefrontal cortex hits where it should. We mistake our capacity to override instinct for proof of superiority, when in fact much of our current misery comes from that override being permanently engaged. The ability to suspend impulse was meant for moments of danger, not as a lifestyle. When restraint becomes chronic, disconnection follows. That’s
exhaustion with a clever justification.
I’m glad you’ve stepped out of that machinery as much as possible! Doing so doesn’t make us pure or exempt; it makes us less confused. We still live inside the species, but we are no longer mistaking its most delusional self-image for truth. That’s a hard place to stand because it removes the comfort of shared illusion.
I look forward to what you write on this, Karin! Anger, when it’s lucid, is a form of care that hasn’t been dulled yet. And thank you, truly, for meeting sharpness with sharpness :))) We are the same, and I am so glad!
There were a lot of words in this essay that felt weighted or heavy - "not festive but forensic" "audit" "pressure" "mourning" - and they were all words that were important in expressing what you had to say. They left me feeling when I came to the one question: "What is one thing you can no longer pretend not to know?" that the answer had to be something I did wrong, some way I hid or wasn't honest. The assumption that with an audit being that there must be deception going on. And it's true enough that often that is the case. But not always.
Perhaps it's that I'm out of sync with the timing of it all. The kind of reckoning and then awareness you describe is what I experienced earlier in the fall, and the answer to the question was not related to any dishonesty or intentional hiding on my part. It was more of a survival tactic that went on a lot longer than it needed to go on, and now it's over. Do I know exactly what to do with that? No, I can't say I do. And I'm fine with that unfolding as the rest of it has unfolded - in its own time.
I do remember years in which I felt this in the time frame you described. Just not this year, or maybe every single year. I loved what you wrote about failure and trying: "Realising that your past self was sincere, and that sincerity still wasn't enough is uniquely destabilising. It dismantles the comforting narrative that failure only happens when we don't try. Sometimes you try. Sometimes you try intelligently. Sometimes you even try bravely. And still, the year ends before you are ready." And I think that's worth mourning, too. To try sincerely, even bravely, and still fail, can be a crushing blow.
And then you write: "What stings are the internal betrayals, the small, cumulative acts of self-evasion that never make it onto a résumé...desires deferred." That phrase, "desires deferred" if I understand you correctly, is another name for the internal betrayals and acts of self-evasion. I understand that that may be exactly what they are, at the same time it feels like that might be an overly harsh judgment of one's self. I can't help feeling that if I'd written to you characterising my desires deferred as internal betrayals and acts of self-evasion, you'd read that and reframe somehow into a more generous understanding of what I'd done.
Clarity and precision are important, and you are masterful in both. And you are a human being who, like many of us, carries a lot of expectations from others in this often difficult month. If this is out of line then I apologise, but I care very much that it feels to me you are being more harsh and tough with yourself than you would normally be. I don't ask that you hold anything back, just that you be as kind to yourself as you have been to me, and I believe to others as well.
You’re right about something essential: the language of audits, pressure, and mourning carries an implicit moral charge, and it can suggest wrongdoing where there may have been none. Survival is not deception. Endurance is not evasion. There are stretches of life where postponement is not a failure of courage but a necessary holding pattern, and naming those stretches accurately matters. I’m glad you pushed on that, because it sharpens the essay rather than undermining it.
I also want to honour your timing point. Reckonings don’t run on a shared calendar. They arrive when the system is ready to absorb them, not when December demands content. If yours came earlier, and what followed was not clarity but completion of a long-running survival strategy, that’s not being out of sync! That IS sync, just not with the season’s choreography. And being able to say “this is over, even if I don’t yet know what replaces it” is a clean ending.
Where I’ll stand by the phrase “desires deferred”, and also refine it….. deferral becomes self-evasion only when it continues past the point of necessity and is then retroactively justified as wisdom. But you’re right that the line between prudence and avoidance is contextual. From the inside, the same action can be either. That’s why I’m careful not to turn it into a universal accusation. My essay names a pattern, not a verdict. And yes, if you had written to me describing your own deferrals, I would have asked what they protected, what they cost, and when they stopped being useful, not to absolve or indict, but to locate the truth of their function.
You’re perceptive to notice that the tone of my essay is harder on me than I often am in conversation. That wasn’t accidental. I was writing from a place where kindness, in the usual sense, would have been a form of evasion. Some moments ask for gentleness; others ask for accuracy, even when it stings. This one was the latter. But you’re right that accuracy doesn’t require cruelty, and your reminder is a good one… not to soften the truth, but to make sure it remains precise rather than punitive.
Thank you, Doc, for reading me as a person and not just a voice on the page, and for offering a generosity that doesn’t dilute the thinking!
And thank you, Tamara, for how you respond, rather than react to what I write (and other people as well). I appreciate your clarification on "desires deferred" - it makes a difference in how I understand it. I like the questions you'd have asked about my deferrals, and think I'll sit down with those questions to see what comes up.
I respect, enormously, your desire for precision and not evasion, as a reason for being harder on yourself than on others. And I have plenty of experience of your capacity for kindness and gentleness, which is accurate without harshness. Thank you for being willing to use them with yourself as well as others.
You have never been just a voice on the page - or even now, just a voice. I never forget there is a person writing these essays and notes and stories. And that it is a person I've come to care for a great deal, and that you are someone I treasure as an essential part of my life. I do promise to try to never dilute the thinking! :))
I love this article Tamara. It really resonates with me. I’ve spent all of December feeling uneasy, feeling that I hadn’t given my best to 2025, feeling a little adrift. And your essay nailed the reasons why.
And you are right. It’s not unfamiliar. Maybe it’s triggered by the days closing in and the expectations of holiday cheer. Maybe it’s the feeling that you know the answer but the path still feels unclear.
Either way, I sense it’s good to sit with the feeling for a while and not pretend, as you so eloquently lay bare, that the arrival of January 1st will herald some kind of metamorphosis.
Maybe we look to the lessons of complexity theory. That would suggest the idea of preconceived big changes is pointless. It would advocate for abandoning the illusion of linear cause-effect relationships. The kind that feature in most self-help books.
“Just follow these 10 rules for life and you’re guaranteed amazing success in 2026!”.
Bullshit.
Instead we could test multiple small interventions to see what emerges, dialling up things that appear to be helpful and stopping things that don’t.
Treating the new year like an experiment with no real idea of the outcomes could be liberating. I’m going to give it a try.
I thank you for all your beautiful writing in 2025 and wish you a wonderful 2026.
This is a sort of non-clarity with integrity. Knowing the answer without yet knowing the route is a legitimate state, even though our culture treats it as a defect that must be resolved immediately. December sharpens that discomfort because it removes the illusion that time itself will do the work for us. It won’t. But neither does it demand dramatic conversion on a fixed date.
I’m sympathetic to your instinct to reject rule-based transformation. Life doesn’t respond well to guarantees, and cause-and-effect narratives flatter our need for control more than they respect reality. Small adjustments, made attentively and revised honestly, often change more than grand declarations because they engage feedback rather than fantasy. That’s what I try to do.
Thank you, dear Paul, for spending this year with my writing, and for meeting it with such thoughtfulness, as always! I wish you a 2026 that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but reveals itself slowly, in ways you can actually inhabit.
Your essay is unusually rigorous in how it treats time as a constraint system. I would add the idea of December as a compression test rather than a verdict. Like stress-testing a structure, it doesn’t tell you whether the design was noble or well-intentioned; it shows you what deforms under load. What buckles is information. The danger is misreading deformation as moral weakness instead of structural misallocation.
That’s why your refusal of resolutions feels correct. Resolutions optimize for intention; December exposes allocation. Where attention, courage, and desire were actually spent—not imagined, not rehearsed. That distinction runs cleanly through the piece, and it’s rare to see it articulated without sentimentality or self-absolution. But then, we expect that from you.
The choice of William Blake’s drawings is perfect. Blake understood pressure before productivity culture did, his figures always strain, compressed between vision and body, prophecy and bone. They look unfinished because they are mid-revelation. That mirrors your essay’s intelligence. You’re not aestheticising incompletion.
For me, this really does close the year. With calibration. It doesn’t ask me to become someone else, only to stop mislabeling motion as commitment and imagination as participation. I admire how you think here: precise, unsparing, but never performative. You don’t offer comfort; you offer accuracy. And at the end of a year, that’s the most usable gift there is.
I like this framing, Alexander, because it shifts responsibility without collapsing into blame. A compression test doesn’t ask whether the structure had good intentions; it asks whether the load was placed where it could be carried. When things bend, the reflex is self-indictment. But very often what failed was distribution. Too much weight on the wrong joints for too long.
I’m especially taken by your point about deformation carrying information. That’s something we tend to miss because we rush to correct it. Buckling is treated as error, when in fact it’s a diagnostic signal. It tells you where attention was overextended, where courage was rationed too thinly, where desire was outsourced to imagination instead of given a foothold in action. Ignoring that data in favour of renewed intention is how people repeat the same year with different stationery.
Of course I chose Blake! I value his drawings precisely because they resist completion. They don’t resolve vision into comfort. The strain remains visible. Revelation costs something bodily there; it’s not clean, not uplifting, not scalable. That incompleteness is so truthful! I wanted images that didn’t soothe the essay, only kept it honest. And I knew I would illustrate my essay with his drawings after I wrote my first paragraph.
I’m glad this felt like calibration. I didnt want closure. Calibration corrects direction while movement continues. And accuracy, as you say, is usable. Comfort is consumed quickly. Accuracy stays.
Thank you for reading me with such discernment! And for the beautiful compliment about my mind.
“If you can meet with Triumph & Disaster, & treat those two imposters just the same” (Kipling).
I prefix my response with Rudyard’s philosophical wisdom, because he can, in a nutshell, write what would require of me several hours thought & thousands of words.
The visceral melancholy of your essay, Tamara, is something with which I’m too familiar.
The difference for me is that I tend to start a year at any time of day, & year. I’m intellectually beholden neither to solar nor lunar calendars. Not that my calendar juggling in any way questions or undermines the reality of what you describe. But it does help me live according to what I consider my priorities, rather than suffer the insolence of having to conform to the arbitrary & too often pointless timetables of others. For me, a new year naturally follows a major event, either in my life, or more externally. It deletes the rather artificial public EOY.
By calibrating my life around events important to me, my family & life, imposed chronologies dissolve.
I can do without the noise & the weeds of what too often passes for our culture.
Your essay is heady stuff. Thanks once more Tamara.
I like that you begin with Kipling as compression, a way of acknowledging that some recognitions arrive already distilled. And yet, what you do next matters more: you refuse to let the calendar dictate the terms under which those recognitions must occur.
What you’re describing is a reassertion of authorship over when meaning begins. To let a year start at an event rather than a date is to privilege consequence over convention. It’s a serious refusal to outsource orientation. Public chronologies are efficient; they synchronise us. But they’re blunt instruments for interior life. They flatten difference. They insist on simultaneity where none exists.
Anchoring life to events that actually change the stakes doesn’t negate December’s pressure so much as relocate it. The reckoning still happens, but it’s triggered by rupture, loss, arrival, decision, moments that genuinely reorder a life, not by a page turning. That’s discernment choosing signal over noise.
Your résistance to cultural weeds resonates. Much of what passes for collective meaning now is overgrown with instruction and undernourished in substance. I see stepping back from that as maintenance of attention.
Thank you, Russell, for reading my essay without demanding that it govern you, and for offering a way of living alongside it rather than inside its calendar!
By your evident thorough yet nuanced understanding of what I sought to express in my response, it’s clear why you’ve attracted so many genuine followers in short time. Further comment from me would be superfluous. (Once I establish residence on extra-antipodean shores, I hope to become a more substantial subscriber.)
Tamara, your essay does something genuinely difficult. It refuses both consolation and performance. The way you frame December as a procedural, bored, unimpressed interrogation cuts through an entire industry of seasonal sentimentality. That image of time as an auditor with a clipboard names the experience with a clarity that makes it hard to hide behind mood or metaphor, and that’s a remarkable achievement.
I appreciate your insistence that unfinishedness is about deferred inhabitation, all the lives we carried in imagination and never committed to in the body. That’s a deep insight, and a culturally urgent one. We live in a world that rewards optionality and calls it freedom, that mistakes rehearsal for progress and then wonders why December feels like a reckoning. You articulate, with unsettling accuracy, how imagination becomes a holding pattern, how “later” turns from generosity into quiet self-betrayal.
Your example of reorganising the bookshelf instead of reading it is devastating in its ordinariness. It captures the way we touch our lives indirectly, managing, optimising, curating, while avoiding the one move that would actually change the stakes, which is a universal idea. That moment alone could stand as a parable for an entire generation trained to stay impressive rather than exposed.
For me, that truth is that I’ve been calling preparation “being responsible” when it was really a way to postpone disappointment, mine and other people’s. I stayed in motion to avoid choosing, and in doing so, let time choose for me. Your essay didn’t invent that recognition, but it cornered it so cleanly that it couldn’t slip away this year.
I also appreciate your resistance to aestheticising melancholy. That warning feels necessary. December sadness has become a vibe; you insist it be treated instead as data. Not something to decorate, but something to listen to, even when it’s boring, repetitive, or unshareable. That insistence on sobriety is one of the essay’s moral strengths.
What you’ve written doesn’t tell the reader what to do next, and that restraint feels intentional and earned.
This is an end-of-year reflection AND refusal to let time be neutral. You’ve managed to give language to a pressure many people feel but can’t talk about without turning it into either shame or slogans. That clarity is rare. Thank you for writing something that doesn’t soothe, doesn’t scold, and doesn’t pretend the question will go away just because the calendar turns. You’re one of the kind, Tamara.
Fascinating to see the distinction you draw between unfinishedness and deferred inhabitation. That gap is where so much contemporary exhaustion lives. We’re trained to keep options alive long past the point where they can still be lived honestly, and then we are surprised when time feels punitive rather than neutral. But time doesn’t judge us; it’s simply indifferent to our rehearsals. It records where weight actually landed.
Preparation can be ethical, but it can also become a socially approved way to delay exposure, especially when other people are implicated. Staying in motion looks considerate. Choosing, by contrast, creates friction. It disappoints. It reveals priorities that can’t be smoothed over with good explanations later. When we avoid that discomfort, we outsource agency to drift.
Your point about treating melancholy as information matters. Feelings that repeat rarely ask to be styled; they ask to be read. December sadness, when stripped of its seasonal gloss, is often remarkably plain. It’s not poetic. It’s procedural. And that plainness is precisely what makes it useful, if we don’t rush to decorate it into something shareable.
You’re right that my essay doesn’t instruct. That restraint is respect. Telling people what to do next often relieves them too quickly of the work of discernment. Pressure clarifies, but it doesn’t prescribe. What comes after recognition has to be negotiated individually, in circumstances that no essay can standardise.
Thank you, Clara, for engaging so thoughtfully, and for the lovely compliment!
I think this might be my first comment on this app, but it feels necessary. Thank you, Tamara, for writing this piece. It made me feel both uncomfortably exposed and oddly cozy at the same time, for reasons to me mostly currently unknown, but I really appreciate it. Thank you!
I’m very moved you chose this essay for a first comment.
That combination you describe makes sense to me. Feeling exposed without being attacked usually means something accurate has been named without being moralised. When language doesn’t rush to fix you, judge you, or improve you, it can create a strange sense of safety even as it strips away a few defences. That’s often what people mistake for coziness: relief at not being managed.
Thank you, Adéla, for stepping into the conversation, especially with that honesty! First comments are a small risk, and I’m grateful you did it.
Beautifully written! I will read this more than once, after my dense and heavy freeze-response-to-everything carries me forward for another few days ;) but glad to ditch the weight of the proverbial 'clean slate' before January 1. Thank you! ❤️
Thank you, Helen, I’m glad you named the freeze because it’s one of the most misunderstood responses we have.
Freeze isn’t laziness or avoidance as many would rush to name. It’s the nervous system saying, this is too much to absorb all at once. In that sense, rereading later is timing. Insight arrives when the body is ready to receive it, not when the calendar demands it. January’s obsession with starting fresh often ignores this entirely, mistaking pressure for momentum.
I also think there’s something sane about refusing the fantasy of the “clean slate”. Slates are for classrooms and courtrooms, not for lived lives! We don’t erase experience; we carry it differently. Letting go of the demand to be unburdened by January 1st can actually return weight where it belongs as texture. Something earned, not something to purge.
Move forward slowly if that’s what your system requires! Slowness, when chosen rather than imposed, is a form of care that keeps you intact for clarity to catch up.
Thank you for reading, and for trusting your own pace with honesty!
I really enjoyed how you shifted the year-end mindset from the marketable time of renewal to the year-end review one does owing to the realization that another tally on your lifeline has expired… devastating.
December has the quality of the cruelest part of the left-brain that holds you to account with precise accounting but fails to return the insights it gains back to the holistic right-side of the brain. This makes for an uncomfortable review that lacks voltage, but instead you are left with a spreadsheet-worth of neatly categorized ideas, complete with structure and the illusion of a well thought-out review. Yes, you have all the data one needs to make an effective plan for the next quarter… but it feels like something is missing, surely this is evident in the almost comical lack of sustained follow-through. I am certainly not taking umbrage with that desire to gather the facts and evidence to interrogate in that liminal gloaming of the calendar, but we seem to be ineffectual at using this year-end period for something valuable. For me, that effort to interrogate is noble, necessary and illuminating and yet it is only part of the effort.
You wrote, “We are desperate to make the year say something coherent, as if coherence could be retrofitted after the fact, as if a clean arc might redeem long stretches of inertia, hesitation, or avoidance, and as if naming the lesson, preferably in a sentence tidy enough to share, might compensate for the harder, less photogenic truth that the lesson was understood intellectually and still not lived.” Jamming sense into stories after the fact is a delightful part of the human psyche, we are rather good it! But it is rather flawed, and our capacity to make the story coherent is why most eyewitness testimonies are unreliable, it is why grandad’s fishing tales are unbelievable, and its often why those efforts to derive a “lesson” from a breakup is more arduous— our meaning making is a script and one that is not to dissimilar from the yearly pilgrimage to through December’s interrogation.
That lacking is something I have felt for most of my life. When I read this essay I am reminded of the powerful quality of reflecting to recognize resonance. There is a potency I seem to forget (possibly because I am deluged with the need to be cheery and in my exhaustion I forget) the usefulness of quiet contemplation to check if the calibration of your year was close, distant, or perfectly aligned to those desires and wants that is felt in the body. And I don’t mean this in that auditing sense of checking if a = b, reconciling the goals with the results and giving one a final grade for the year, I am talking about the need to take what you have measured and sit with it and feel it, determine if you actually value what it was you subjected yourself to in those violent-adjacent ideas of pressure, exposure and compression that life throws at you. This takes the story off the page and into the body. And this where I feel I am lacking the skill to turn fact into insight.
Because there is something supremely unflattering about trying to measure everything, to ascribe meaning to all that has transpired and then having no cognitive capacity to do anything except feel miserable about the lack of movement. I have found that the effort of marking, measuring and doing a detailed audit of the previous 11 months to gain coherence is not the only technique to gain insight and wisdom—it has its place, sure— but as you say the greatest teacher is often “unpolished honesty that doesn’t arrive on demand and cannot be gamed”. That state of comprehension one experiences when the mind isn’t grasping at answers, but instead is given space to interrogate, unencumbered by fitting into a specific structure or scaffolding, this is where some of the greatest ideas are found. It is this marrying of measurement and introspection that I see as the grand exercise of becoming. Because doing the performative December audit to determine the January resolutions is not a review, it is a circular process that needs to bring the insights back into presence. It isn’t enough just to make the lists, tick off the goals, and develop the life or business plan—you also need to find space to really inhale the meaning of the story you have cobbled together lest it be meaningless data that you use to tell yourself you did something meaningful to prepare for the next 12 months.
Tamara, you and I discussed this the other day, but I see one of the challenges as the lack patience. We want to show movement but don’t have the time or energy to actually generate momentum. Instead we do a performance of creation (I feel this all the time in corporate life: the illusion of doing) rather than the act of transformation. We have deified the efficient path and forgotten the clumsy, wobbly, meandering path for fear that we aren’t doing enough or are being perceived as lazy. But sitting in meaningful silence isn’t laziness or abdicating your responsibility to hustle, it is the place from which the totality of your insight can be found. You measure the year, give it the story AND THEN the real work begins.
We certainly don’t want to disincentivize people’s predilection for aspirational planning, and the effort and striving that can happen around December — what I think we need to give people is the additional ability to slowly analyze what it all means not just between the ears, but in our totality. What you achieved, what you failed to achieve, what you started and what you ended are all good to take note of… and then what?
“December doesn’t follow up, doesn’t offer guidance, doesn’t check whether you acted on what you noticed; it simply steps aside and leaves you alone with what surfaced, entirely indifferent to whether you turn that recognition into change or carry it, unresolved, straight into the next year.”
This where I think we are bereft — at least I know I have been when we actually look at the life we have lived over a span of months with precisions, what are we left with? When I am left in the threshold of what was and what is to come next, rather than analyze with precision and use that earned insight, I seem to rush to the next step of piling my calendar, lists, and goals with stuff to do almost to absolve myself of the harsh work of reviewing what was desired and what was inertia. It strikes me as important to make that distinction—between what I maintain because of inertia and what I am aiming for to achieve my desire. Realistically, I tend to just take the path of least resistance and think about the future and take only a fraction of that insight into January. And you named it almost immediately, if I didn’t add to the to-do list and start conjuring the resolution for that future desired state, I would default to that other tried and true technique: I would anesthetize.
You left us with your approach to the post-December reckoning as a question imbued with curiosity. I am taking the insight gained from your essay and trying my best to integrate what I witnessed—slowly and with genuine care. I also want to take heed of moments where I have anesthetized and look for the miscalibration: not to excoriate myself (a favourite pastime, sadly) but to represent that felt experience not as a performative output but a relic to be meditated on and interrogated with the voltage of the body and the mind: to often I just let the mind make the decision on the veracity of my past efforts. I want the body to join the effort. I doubt this will yield an explosive rupturous next phase where I will have some shareable transcendent experience, but I expect a subtle shift in trajectory—away from performance and towards a deeper insight weaving together the observed and the felt.
The shift from renewal to review is devastating precisely because it strips the season of its cosmetics. Renewal flatters the ego; review confronts finitude. One is aspirational theatre, the other an arithmetic, and when the latter appears without interpretation, it can feel merciless. A tally on the lifeline doesn’t ask how hard you tried but it simply notes that another unit has passed.
I like your sharp observation about the accounting mindset, a year-end review that remains purely analytical produces something eerily familiar to anyone who has lived inside corporate or institutional systems: immaculate dashboards, colour-coded insights, action points that look convincing and then mysteriously fail to generate traction. You have all the information required to “do better”, and yet nothing moves. That failure is a category error; data without digestion does becomes weight.
You’re right that we are remarkably skilled at retrofitting coherence. We do it instinctively. Cognitive science has shown repeatedly that memory is reconstructive rather than archival, we don’t retrieve events, we rebuild them. That’s why eyewitness testimony is unreliable, why family stories mutate with each retelling, why breakups get re-scripted into moral fables that bear little resemblance to what was actually felt in the moment. December invites the same manoeuvre… we turn a year into a story because stories are easier to carry than contradictions. But coherence is not the same as truth, and explanation is not the same as integration.
Where your comment becomes especially important is in the distinction you draw between recognition and resonance. Recognition is mental, yes, this happened; yes, I see the pattern. Resonance is bodily… does this life, as lived, feel aligned with what I value when no one is watching? That second question cannot be answered in a spreadsheet. It requires slowness, and slowness is precisely what the season refuses us. Cheer must be performed, momentum simulated, closure declared, all while the body asks for withdrawal and consolidation.
Measurement alone can leave you flat, even despondent, because it exposes discrepancy without offering orientation. When everything is assessed and nothing is absorbed, misery is a predictable outcome. The missing move, and this is where I think your insight deepens my essay, is the transition from assessment to inhabitation. Not “what happened?” but “how did living this way actually feel, once the noise drops?”
There are concrete examples of this failure everywhere. People leave jobs with immaculate postmortems and walk straight into roles that reproduce the same exhaustion. Relationships end with beautifully reasoned lessons that never alter the chooser’s instincts. Businesses conduct quarterly reviews that generate impressive documentation and identical mistakes. In each case, analysis occurred; transformation did not. Why? Because the body was never consulted. The cost was never felt, only named.
Your reflection on patience cuts to the cultural nerve, and to mine. We confuse visible motion with progress and stillness with negligence. The clumsy, uneven, uncertain path has fallen out of favour because it cannot be defended easily. Silence produces nothing to show. Yet silence is often where integration happens as recalibration. A barely perceptible shift in what you can no longer tolerate. A subtle reweighting of attention. Those changes reveal themselves later, through different choices made almost without commentary.
What you say about rushing into January is painfully accurate. Lists, goals, calendars are often acts of self-soothing. They reassure us that we are “doing something” when what we are actually doing is avoiding the harder confrontation between desire and inertia. And when planning fails to numb that discomfort, anesthesia becomes the backup strategy because we are human and exhausted….
I’m impressed by the care with which you approach the question I left open. You don’t look for a breakthrough or a shareable insight but for a more honest internal collaboration — mind and body in dialogue rather than hierarchy. That is the real antidote to the circularity you describe. Don’t abandon planning, slow it down enough that meaning can catch up!
The subtle shift you anticipate is, I suspect, the only kind that lasts. No rupture, no reinvention, but a change in how seriously you take what you already know when it registers somatically rather than intellectually. Moving away from performance and toward participation rarely looks impressive. It does, however, change the direction of travel.
Thank you for this, Adam, for its intelligence, its patience, and its refusal to accept clarity without consequence! You always extend my essays in unbelievable ways.
I think one of the more valuable parts of being a Museguided reader is running your own perceptual lenses and heuristics through the Tamara logic and see what the synthesis yields. Your writing invites the reader to do a review in ways that are both subtle and encouraging. At least to me. The weight of the logic and consideration you put into a consideration of something like the atmosphere of December, makes me wonder — often as I am exposed to something entirely new — if I could with a refinement of my own logic pathways. The answer, even if it is in contradiction to the Museguided reframe, is invariable yes: it was valuable to run those scripts again. I tend to learn something everything time.
And I find that happens most frequently in these comments exchanges. I appreciate your care and willingness to continue the discussion with the same depth as you use to conjure your essay. As always, an absolute pleasure to discuss these matters!
This means a lot because you’re describing exactly the type of reading I write for, even if I can never quite say that out loud without it sounding grander than it is.
What you call “running your own perceptual lenses through the Tamara logic” is, to my mind, the opposite of persuasion. Not adopting a frame but stress-testing your own? If the synthesis holds, great! If it cracks or contradicts what I’ve written, that’s just as valuable. Thought that survives contact with another mind becomes sturdier, not weaker. We are the best example.
I’m glad you consider contradiction as part of the value. Agreement teaches very little. Friction, when it’s thoughtful rather than reactive, sharpens discernment. If reading something new doesn’t force a re-run of your internal scripts, even briefly, it probably hasn’t reached the level of consequence. Learning, at least the kind that lasts, almost always involves recalibration rather than conversion.
And yes, the comments matter enormously to me for this reason. An essay is a proposition; the exchanges are where it becomes relational, where ideas are tested against lived experience, temperament, and résistance. I don’t see that as an add-on to the work, it IS part of the work. Staying in the conversation at the same depth is a way of honouring the seriousness with which others are engaging.
I love that you are always curious rather than comfortable. That willingness to keep running the scripts, especially when they don’t resolve neatly, is amazing! Never change that!
I am speechless… I’ll come back to this. I just need to let everything sink in and comprehend that this synchronicity is the Universe’s way of telling me I am exactly where I am supposed to be and all I did this month is something to be proud of.
Take the pause! It’s doing more work than any immediate interpretation could.
I’ll gently challenge one part of what you wrote, not to negate it, but to refine it. I don’t think moments like this are the universe reassuring us that we are where we are supposed to be. That framing can slip into comfort too quickly. What feels more accurate to me is this: you are where you actually are, and for once you are not trying to outrun that fact. That’s the relief. Not destiny, but alignment with reality.
Pride doesn’t have to come from visible outcomes to be earned. Sometimes it comes from staying with something enough to let it register, resisting the urge to reframe, rush, or redeem the moment with meaning before it’s finished speaking. Letting things sink in is a form of respect for your own experience.
If this month asked something quieter of you, like patience, endurance, restraint, honesty without resolution, those don’t announce themselves loudly, but they count. Often more than the things we’re trained to celebrate.
Come back to it when you’re ready. Nothing here is perishable. Thank you, dear Beatrice, for trusting the pause!
Yes, I too just rearranged my book collection. But looking at our shelves of books tells us who we are, sorta. And those that no longer fit who I have become, out they go. Yup, I'm slightly queasy about this whole new year thing. Eating as many cookies as possible before I deny myself again (not denial, limit setting?) But sorting out the books to let go of some? That feels good. Oh, and your question? Oh my!
Letting go of books feels cleaner than letting go of habits. Objects are cooperative; they leave when asked. Selves are more stubborn. Still, shelves do act as a kind of inventory, not of who we aspire to be, but of what once held our attention in order to earn space. Releasing a book that no longer fits is an admission that you’ve moved, even if the movement was subtle.
I smiled at the cookie confession, because that wobble between indulgence and restraint is exactly where language starts doing gymnastics. We rename denial as discipline, discipline as care, care as intention… sometimes wisely, sometimes defensively. What matters less is which word wins and more whether the gesture actually responds to what you need, rather than to the calendar’s demand for symbolic purity.
Thank you, Michele, for sharing this moment so candidly! There’s a lot of honesty tucked into that queasiness, and I appreciate you bringing it into my room.
And thank you, Tamara, how quickly and thoughtfully you responded. I went out to write, just couldn't, and came home to your actual reply. I feel so attended to. How you do all of this? Yes, shelves are easier than selves. Sigh...
I’m glad you felt that, being attended to matters more than any clever sentence ever could.
There are moments when writing doesn’t happen because something is rearranging itself internally and doesn’t want to be rushed into form yet. Going out to write and coming back empty-handed is often the sign that attention moved inward instead of outward. That counts, even if it leaves no page behind to prove it. It happens to me all the time. I don’t consider myself blocked.
And yes….. shelves yield easily :)
Selves don’t.
They resist because they’re made of habits, attachments, half-kept promises, and tenderness we’re still unsure how to hold. Reorganising them takes time, patience, and a tolerance for not knowing what stays. That could be a good essay to write…. about selves and shelves.
As for how I do all of this, I don’t think of it as doing. I think of it as staying present where something real is happening and responding before it evaporates. I am also disciplined. Attention, when offered sincerely, creates a loop. You gave it first by reading carefully. I’m simply meeting it where it landed.
I shared this essay because I too find in the metaphor of December a scary recognition that once more I wasted opportunities to put dreams and hopes into operation. I love the comment that openness is not freedom. It made me sit up. I take it that being open to possibilities and opportunities while informative that alone is not enough. We must incarnate our desire with solid action. A focus of attention that requires the discipline make a dream come true. Great job Tom
Thank you for sharing it, Tom, and for naming the unease without trying to neutralise it!
Possibility can inform us, but it can also sedate us. When everything remains open, nothing has to be risked. The real threshold isn’t between dreaming and acting, but between wanting without consequence and wanting that accepts friction, disappointment, and irreversibility.
Action is what gives openness weight. Without some form of constraint, desire stays abstract, and abstraction is comfortable precisely because it never has to answer for results. Attention, when concentrated, is less about self-control than about consent, agreeing to let one thing matter more than the others, even temporarily, even imperfectly.
December doesn’t accuse us of having dreams; it asks whether we allowed any of them to change how we behaved on an ordinary day. That’s a harder, more honest measure than success or failure.
To paraphrase a wag dreaming is fine but don’t forget to give them legs after sleeping on it I amend the statement to dreaming of a castle in the air is fine as long as you build a foundation for it. THH
This is devastating in the amazing, competent way only you seem to manage, Museguided, yes, but also unsentimental, almost prosecutorial. You don’t console the reader; you subpoena them. And somehow make that feel like care.
You ask, finally, the only question that matters: What is one thing you can no longer pretend not to know?
For me, reading this, it was this: that I have been using explanation as a substitute for choice. If I can narrate why something hasn’t happened, contextualise it, intellectualise it, give it a lineage, I don’t have to cross the uglier threshold of deciding. Your essay made it painfully clear that fluency is not the same as honesty, and insight is not the same as entry. I’ve been very articulate at the edge of my own life.
What I admire the most is how you refuse the usual December binaries—despair vs hope, collapse vs reinvention—and instead locate something colder and truer: pressure. Not motivation. Not inspiration. Compression. The sense that the year hasn’t failed us so much as stopped indulging our rehearsals. That line about imagined futures lining up as witnesses rather than accusers is exacting and original. You reframe regret as evidence. Evidence of attention misallocated.
And the Paris dusk, oh, how I miss my city, is a masterstroke… that December clarity is the anesthesia wearing off. Possibility sobers up. What’s left isn’t bleak; it’s precise. That precision, as you suggest, may be the only real kindness time offers.
This didn’t make me want to “do better”.
It made me want to stop pretending I don’t already know where the bargain has gone bad.
Which feels like exactly your point.
Tamara, thank you for a year in which I’ve grown and evolved beyond my imagination thanks to your essays!
Ohhh perfect, because you named the quietest trap of all: substituting explanation for commitment. That move is especially seductive for people who think clearly, speak well, and can trace causality with elegance. Narrative competence can become a hiding place. If you can explain why something hasn’t happened with enough nuance, you get to feel morally engaged without being existentially implicated. The story stands in for the step.
The fluency without entry is something I see as one of the most socially rewarded forms of non-action. We live in a culture that praises articulation so loudly that it forgets to ask what articulation is for. Explanation becomes a buffer zone… sophisticated enough to earn approval, safe enough to avoid the cost of choosing. And choice, unlike insight, closes doors. It leaves fingerprints. It creates consequences that cannot be revised with better language later.
I’m glad you noticed the pressure rather than the pep talk. Pressure is impersonal. It doesn’t cheer you on or shame you. It simply reduces margin. That reduction is clarifying because it strips away the luxury of rehearsal. When time stops indulging us, it’s only accurate. The year tightens the frame until what matters can no longer hide behind possibility.
And yes, the sobriety you describe matters more to me than any version of hope I could sell. Sobriety doesn’t promise improvement but it restores proportion. It tells you where the exchange stopped making sense, where you kept paying in thought, justification, patience, or self-understanding, while avoiding the one cost that couldn’t be deferred: deciding.
If my essay didn’t make you want to “do better”…. well… that’s a relief! :) Better is vague and endlessly postponable. Knowing where the bargain failed is concrete. It’s actionable without being theatrical. And it doesn’t require reinvention, only honesty sturdy enough to be lived with.
Thank you, ma chère Céline, for reading with such precision, and for meeting my ideas at the exact depth they were written from! Your attention is never neutral, it changes both sides.
Always! In awe! And impatient to read you in the new year. Merci infiniment, chère amie.
The real thing being exposed in the December audit is the clash of desire against grandiosity. We have, both an unlimited capacity to want, and therefore remain unsatisfied, as well as unlimited optimism, or maybe delusion, that next year will be different. This recurrence stems from exactly what you pinpoint: the belief that time is linear and progressive, not cyclical. Inherent to the progressive paradigm is the presupposition that things must get better in some measurable way, otherwise you've failed or are stagnant. This completely contradicts our lived experience of never quite being satisfied; of always wanting more, yet remaining stuck in a loop of reactivity and unmet expectations. What's grandiose is our absolute certainty in linear time, and our expectation that next year will be the year we turn things around, despite "failing" to do so in every previous year.
I love your framing of touching your life instead of living it; organizing the book collection instead of reading it. This is why selling programs or memberships or seminars is so effective, and it's why people love to obsessively plan and resolve: it gives us the illusion of progress or productivity; it makes us feel closer to our goals without actually walking down the path, and it's psychologically comforting because every step forward is a step you will need to retread when you retreat, and we always love having the option to retreat.
December is the reckoning. It wouldn't be or shouldn't be if we could just recognize the cycle and not insist that we are on some linear path, where the choice is only advancement or retreat. We also should recognize the perpetual nature of desire, which is just as cyclical as time, with its seasonal nature depending on the ebb and flow of our appetites. Winter will come again; you will be hungry once again and this isn't a trap, but the pulsating proof of life. The year ends before we are ready because we are never ready; we are never satisfied.
Brilliant as always. A true holiday gift. Thank you, Tamara.
You sharpen something I deliberately left only half-lit, the danger isn’t desire itself, but our insistence on narrating desire as a problem to be solved rather than a force to be stewarded. Wanting doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means something is alive!!! The trouble begins when wanting collides with the fantasy that life should eventually arrive at a stable plateau of fulfillment, after which appetite politely retires.
I’m wary, though, of framing dissatisfaction as failure or as pathology. I think the deeper miscalculation lies in assuming satisfaction was ever meant to be permanent. Desire isn’t an error in the system but the system itself breathing. When we mistake recurrence for stagnation, we start treating ordinary human rhythms as personal incompetence. That’s when optimism tips into self-deception. Hope is not naïve, it’s unmoored from how people actually change, incrementally, unevenly, often sideways.
Your point about planning culture is crucial. Preparation has become a socially acceptable stand-in for courage. It soothes because it preserves reversibility. You can always revise a plan; you can’t revise a choice without consequences. The comfort comes from staying close enough to the edge to feel engaged while retaining the option to pull back. December disrupts that arrangement. It exposes how often we’ve mistaken proximity for participation.
Where I might push this further is here…. the cycle itself isn’t the issue, it’s our refusal to locate responsibility within it. Cycles contextualise agency. Hunger returning doesn’t mean you eat the same meal again. Winter repeating doesn’t mean you wear the same coat. Cyclic time still demands discernment. The reckoning isn’t that we want again, but how we respond to wanting once we recognise the pattern.
I agree with you, Andrew, we are never “ready” in the grand sense. But we are occasionally ready enough. Ready enough to stop calling deferral wisdom. Ready enough to admit when optionality has turned into evasion. Ready enough to act without the guarantee that this time will finally fix the recurring ache.
Thank you for reading so attentively, and for treating desire as evidence that something in us is still asking to be lived! Thank you for supporting me relentlessly for almost a year, especially in the beginning when you believed in my talent like no other!
Of course, Tamara. And what a great year it's been, in accordance with my December audit. Thank you. :)
True! :)
I think it's simpler than that: I choose to jump or I don't. I step into the space I know exists, or I keep pretending there are five things I have to do first. Are there five things I *could* do? Yes. But jumping is the only way I'll ever know.
Hmmmmm yes… And you’re right to strip it down to that.
The “five things first” are not lies. Comforts, I would say. They give shape to hesitation without asking it to end. They feel responsible, even virtuous, because they promise preparation while preserving distance. But at some point, preparation stops being care and starts being choreography.
Jumping isn’t reckless here. It’s honest. It’s the moment when you stop asking for proof that the space will hold you and accept that proof only comes after contact. Nothing in your life that actually mattered began with full certainty. It began with the decision to step before you knew how it would land.
And here’s the part that often goes unsaid…. jumping doesn’t erase fear. It makes fear irrelevant. Once you move, fear becomes information instead of an obstacle. The body catches up. The mind adjusts. The story rewrites itself after the act, not before.
So yes, I agree, you jump, or you keep rehearsing the jump forever. There isn’t a third option that preserves both safety and truth.
Absolutely yes to what wrote here. *Especially* the part about fear. the older I get, the more I've realized that the fear never goes completely away. It's all about how you learn to live and move with the fear, or shrink yourself and stay in its shadow.
True!
This piece blew my mind. So many things in it. And you nail the way I feel right now.
My only addition would be that the "gendered undertone" is ALSO for men. But in a different way. Experiencing unfinishedness as a personal failure is why 40,000 people a year commit suicide --the vast majority of them are are men. And why? Well - you just fight the idea but have to admit that you do realize the you just can not "be that thing" --that collection of persona's. Just can't push that rock up that damn hill.
What I would really like to ask you is: and this might mean a new piece of writing, but I would not presume, is the theme of "inhabiting" your life -- this recurs in the piece. In this. The Newton painting and the idea of failed inhabitation, the Satan observing but not inhabiting intimacy. That thread I would love you to put your laser on and explore.
What DOES it mean to truly inhabit one's life? And would it make a difference in the December audit cycle? Would it matter?
The tragedy is that we can't be happy. We do try. Everything in the month is an audit and indictment, a proctology exam of/in all the selves that I/we try to carry forward. Still, sadly, pathetically, annually, my sincerity, my good intentions, my notes to myself, my flagging self-discipline they are doomed, doomed to fail to live up to those marks. And for what?
So at the end of the day if one could possibly get over productivity culture, possibly surmount the Mountains of Should --what would actually "inhabiting" ones life without regret and self-judgment look like?
I've never disliked a season more than the Christmas season and I've been through 66 of them now through jobs, schools, marriages, children and etc.
Let me be blunt: I f****** hate Christmas. This is such an unhappy, unwelcome idea -- and to have (then, alsoat the same time) to be the dad, the partner, the friend, the whatever. I have to SIMULATE that I'm cheerful and I never think I can do it. But I survive it. Like a month at the dentist, and I'm always so happy when the season is in the rearview mirror. I can forget myself.
Anyhow, I'm a big fan of you and I just want to say thank you for spelling out so well what I at least am feeling at this very moment. The piece made me feel worse and better. Finally happy new year to you - and, as you know, 2026 is going to be the best yet!
You’re right to push back on the gendered point. Unfinishedness punishes men differently, but no less severely. For many men, it isn’t framed as overload but as insufficiency… the dawning recognition that the composite self they were meant to embody (provider, partner, father, moral centre, steady presence, upward trajectory) is structurally uninhabitable. And I’m not referring to laziness or moral failure, but the demands contradict one another. When that contradiction is internalised rather than named, it metastasises into shame. And shame, unlike sadness, isolates. That isolation is where the statistics you cite become tragically legible.
Inhabiting one’s life is not about happiness, coherence, or even self-acceptance. It’s… irreversibility. To inhabit is to allow choices to have consequences that can’t be endlessly revised, narrated away, or postponed. It means standing inside a life where your actions close off other versions, not heroically, not optimistically, but plainly. Most people don’t fear failure as much as they fear finality. Inhabitation introduces finality in small, cumulative ways.
That’s why figures like Newton or Satan are so haunting: they observe, analyse, understand but remain unentered. They know about truth without submitting to it. Observation without participation feels safe, but over time it hollows out meaning. Inhabitation, by contrast, accepts loss as the cost of reality. You don’t get to be everything , and the relief, if it comes at all, comes from no longer trying.
Would inhabiting your life end the December reckoning? No. But it would change its tone. The audit wouldn’t ask why you failed to become more, but whether you stayed present where you actually were. Regret doesn’t vanish, but it becomes specific rather than global. Self-judgement narrows, stops being a verdict on existence and becomes information about limits.
Your hatred of Christmas makes complete sense. This year I was not into Christmas at all. What you’re describing isn’t seasonal grumpiness; it’s the violence of enforced simulation. To be required to perform warmth while managing exhaustion, disappointment, obligation, and accumulated roles is not festive. Survival, in that context, is endurance under constraint. That you emerge relieved rather than redeemed says nothing damning about you; it says something honest about the month!!!
The fact that my essay made you feel worse and better tells me it didn’t lie to you. It didn’t anesthetise. It didn’t promise repair. It stayed with the pressure long enough for something real to surface.
Thank you for reading me with such force, and for bringing your full, unfiltered experience! You seem so alive! And that’s rare and amazing.
Tamara, you nailed it: “insufficiency.” Yep. I think: Here I am in later age and I have given my utmost to every domain of life (as a male) that I can/should invest myself in (family, work, creative, etc.) and yet why is it not enough? Why am I never enough? –that’s the haunting, shaming, voice of the inner assessor who’s waving a bony finger in my face ever December after finding the flaws in my 4th Quarter accounting. Indeed: I have been double dealing with two sets of books.
Also - I think you nailed it as well in drawing out the idea of what it means to truly inhabit one’s life. I went back and reread your piece with that in mind it’s clearer to me now.
Sometimes I wonder if my problem is just a toxic artifact of a uniquely “American” cultural obsession with self-actualization ---I mean, do Greek olive famers mope around torturing themselves emotionally that they should have gone into soybeans? I would surely hope not. In any case: “inhabitation” as you wrote, “accepts loss as the cost of reality.” What a line. Yikes: I’m not sure I can ever accept loss -or- reality. But that is surely the task at hand.
You’ve reminded me of the advice I gave my own daughters when they were young, which was: “You can have anything you want in life! but you can’t have everything you want in life.” As you can see, I’m good at handing out advice, but as far as inhabiting that advice? Well, not so much.
Thank you for all this!
That word “insufficiency” is corrosive precisely because it survives evidence. You can give your best to the roles you were handed, meet the obligations, show up consistently, and still hear that inner assessor tapping the ledger with a skeletal finger, unimpressed. What makes that voice so hard to silence is that it borrows the language of responsibility. It doesn’t say you failed; it says you fell short. That distinction keeps the shame alive while remaining just plausible enough to feel deserved.
I like your image of keeping two sets of books. One ledger tracks effort, care, sacrifice. The other tracks fantasy, the unlived surplus, the imagined version of you who somehow managed to be boundless without cost. No real human can reconcile those accounts, but many men are taught they should. December simply performs the audit aloud.
Ohhhh yes, the American fixation on self-actualisation turns life into a permanent referendum on unrealised potential. The question isn’t “did you live?” but “did you maximise?” That frame all but guarantees disappointment because maximisation has no natural stopping point. I doubt very much that Greek olive farmers lie awake wondering whether they should have been soy magnates because their identities aren’t built around infinite possibility. They inhabit what is, rather than grieve what might have been indefinitely. I am Eastern European, we are the same.
The advice you gave your daughters is sound. And your difficulty living it doesn’t negate its truth; it reveals how hard it actually is. Wisdom is often easier to offer than to embody because embodiment requires relinquishing the fantasy of exception.
What a beautiful reflection!
... and I think you have diagnosed very well what has been buggin me for years, and, while I will not make a standard "New Years' Resolution" to "Inhabit My Life" -- but this truth will be percolating throughout the year and beyond. Thanks again and best to you and your family!
Thank you too! :)
So well said! Thank you for engaging on this! LOL it's like a political boosterism in my head "Keep Shame Alive!" and "Release the Shame Files!"
Sierra. A poem you may appreciate:
Enough.
These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
Until now.
David Whyte, Where Many Rivers Meet
It’s beautiful! Thank you, Michael!
Thank you my friend! Perfect words and just the right moment!
Have you written anywhere about your writing/art curation process? I’m dying to know how you write such insanely brilliant things seemingly constantly!
Regardless, thank you for this, it was the perfect post I didn’t know I needed. I know people say that a lot but man, you are really something else! 🤍
I don’t wait for inspiration, and I don’t write from enthusiasm. I write from irritation, friction, or a question that won’t leave me alone. My essays usually begin as something unresolved that keeps interrupting my thinking while I’m doing other things… walking, reading, answering emails, noticing myself repeating a pattern I don’t care about anymore . When that interruption becomes persistent enough, I stop trying to silence it and let it dictate the direction of the work.
As for curation… hmmm I’m strict. I don’t share everything I write, and I don’t write to fill space. I only publish when the essay has cost me something: certainty, self-image, a comforting narrative. That cost is usually what readers feel as intensity or precision. It’s not brilliance, I wish it were :). It’s just a form of exposure without ornament.
Thank you, Samantha, for reading with such generosity, and for paying attention to details!
Thank you for this answer. As I writer, I always wanted to know this, too. Would always welcome more on your process.
I should write an essay about that. Maybe in the new year. Thank you, Michele!
I guess what adds to that tension is that what is expected, trumpeted, lived socially doesn't actually fit the natural season. And we aren't some mind ideas, but natural beings. The trees, flowers, beings are not flourishing, not striving, not doing in December. But everything kind of withdraws. It's this saying of Camus "In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer". Thats what is propagated, yet to be honest it is unnatural. And then, when you find yourself much more like a tree, without leafs, energy withdrawing into the earth, some bled-out being simply there, you ask yourself- what's wrong with me? Well, nothing...maybe it is society and all those human glorious, supreme, performative concepts we overtake blindly that are alienated.
Ahhh you’re touching something fundamental here, and I’m glad you brought the natural world into the conversation because it exposes how distorted our expectations have become.
The problem is misalignment. December asks bodies to behave like machines (output, cheer, visibility) at the precise moment when everything organic is conserving, retreating, going underground. We’ve mistaken dormancy for dysfunction. When energy withdraws, we pathologise it instead of recognising it as intelligence. A tree without leaves isn’t failing. It’s preparing.
That Camus line is telling precisely because of how it’s been misused, especially on Instagram by people who haven never even opened one of his books. He wasn’t arguing for perpetual brightness; he was naming resilience that exists despite winter, not instead of it. Somewhere along the way, that inner summer got repackaged as a demand to stay radiant year-round, which turns a silent inner resource into a public performance. That’s coercion, and it has nothing to do with courage.
When you describe feeling bled-out, reduced to simply being, that doesn’t read as something gone wrong to me. It reads as a body finally refusing an unnatural script. The discomfort comes from the gap between lived rhythm and social fantasy. We have internalised ideals of constant flourishing that don’t belong to human organisms, then blame ourselves when we can’t live up to them.
I think December exposes a refusal to fake vitality. And that refusal can feel isolating when everything around you insists on gloss, momentum, and emotional productivity. But nothing in the natural world apologises for winter. It doesn’t justify itself. It waits.
Thank you, Karin, for articulating this so clearly! It reframes the unease as a sane response to a deeply unsympathetic cultural demand.
I have goosebumps Tamara, so yes… I know- for myself- that nothing’s wrong with respecting natural rythmns. Since quite a long time I stepped out as much as I can from that “human fantasies”. Too of that turning everything to a one-dimensional platitude ( I adore you for not doing that, it is such a refreshment).
It is a gone-wrong pressure of societies and systems of a species which came to the utterly stupid idea that we are superior, because of the necessity having our prefrontal cortex blown up in order to survive. I’ll write on that arrogance and mis-leaded concepts, it drives me mad, even if I am myself part of homo sapiens. I very much enjoy your sharpness!
That goosebump reaction tells me you’re not arguing this intellectually. In fact you’ve recognised it. And recognition always carries a physical signature before it becomes a position.
The problem isn’t abstraction itself; it’s abstraction that forgets the body and then judges the body for not complying. Once complexity gets flattened into slogans (resilience, growth, positivity, optimisation-by-another-name) something essential is lost: scale!!! Season. Limitation. We start confusing dominance with wisdom, acceleration with intelligence.
Your point about the prefrontal cortex hits where it should. We mistake our capacity to override instinct for proof of superiority, when in fact much of our current misery comes from that override being permanently engaged. The ability to suspend impulse was meant for moments of danger, not as a lifestyle. When restraint becomes chronic, disconnection follows. That’s
exhaustion with a clever justification.
I’m glad you’ve stepped out of that machinery as much as possible! Doing so doesn’t make us pure or exempt; it makes us less confused. We still live inside the species, but we are no longer mistaking its most delusional self-image for truth. That’s a hard place to stand because it removes the comfort of shared illusion.
I look forward to what you write on this, Karin! Anger, when it’s lucid, is a form of care that hasn’t been dulled yet. And thank you, truly, for meeting sharpness with sharpness :))) We are the same, and I am so glad!
There were a lot of words in this essay that felt weighted or heavy - "not festive but forensic" "audit" "pressure" "mourning" - and they were all words that were important in expressing what you had to say. They left me feeling when I came to the one question: "What is one thing you can no longer pretend not to know?" that the answer had to be something I did wrong, some way I hid or wasn't honest. The assumption that with an audit being that there must be deception going on. And it's true enough that often that is the case. But not always.
Perhaps it's that I'm out of sync with the timing of it all. The kind of reckoning and then awareness you describe is what I experienced earlier in the fall, and the answer to the question was not related to any dishonesty or intentional hiding on my part. It was more of a survival tactic that went on a lot longer than it needed to go on, and now it's over. Do I know exactly what to do with that? No, I can't say I do. And I'm fine with that unfolding as the rest of it has unfolded - in its own time.
I do remember years in which I felt this in the time frame you described. Just not this year, or maybe every single year. I loved what you wrote about failure and trying: "Realising that your past self was sincere, and that sincerity still wasn't enough is uniquely destabilising. It dismantles the comforting narrative that failure only happens when we don't try. Sometimes you try. Sometimes you try intelligently. Sometimes you even try bravely. And still, the year ends before you are ready." And I think that's worth mourning, too. To try sincerely, even bravely, and still fail, can be a crushing blow.
And then you write: "What stings are the internal betrayals, the small, cumulative acts of self-evasion that never make it onto a résumé...desires deferred." That phrase, "desires deferred" if I understand you correctly, is another name for the internal betrayals and acts of self-evasion. I understand that that may be exactly what they are, at the same time it feels like that might be an overly harsh judgment of one's self. I can't help feeling that if I'd written to you characterising my desires deferred as internal betrayals and acts of self-evasion, you'd read that and reframe somehow into a more generous understanding of what I'd done.
Clarity and precision are important, and you are masterful in both. And you are a human being who, like many of us, carries a lot of expectations from others in this often difficult month. If this is out of line then I apologise, but I care very much that it feels to me you are being more harsh and tough with yourself than you would normally be. I don't ask that you hold anything back, just that you be as kind to yourself as you have been to me, and I believe to others as well.
You’re right about something essential: the language of audits, pressure, and mourning carries an implicit moral charge, and it can suggest wrongdoing where there may have been none. Survival is not deception. Endurance is not evasion. There are stretches of life where postponement is not a failure of courage but a necessary holding pattern, and naming those stretches accurately matters. I’m glad you pushed on that, because it sharpens the essay rather than undermining it.
I also want to honour your timing point. Reckonings don’t run on a shared calendar. They arrive when the system is ready to absorb them, not when December demands content. If yours came earlier, and what followed was not clarity but completion of a long-running survival strategy, that’s not being out of sync! That IS sync, just not with the season’s choreography. And being able to say “this is over, even if I don’t yet know what replaces it” is a clean ending.
Where I’ll stand by the phrase “desires deferred”, and also refine it….. deferral becomes self-evasion only when it continues past the point of necessity and is then retroactively justified as wisdom. But you’re right that the line between prudence and avoidance is contextual. From the inside, the same action can be either. That’s why I’m careful not to turn it into a universal accusation. My essay names a pattern, not a verdict. And yes, if you had written to me describing your own deferrals, I would have asked what they protected, what they cost, and when they stopped being useful, not to absolve or indict, but to locate the truth of their function.
You’re perceptive to notice that the tone of my essay is harder on me than I often am in conversation. That wasn’t accidental. I was writing from a place where kindness, in the usual sense, would have been a form of evasion. Some moments ask for gentleness; others ask for accuracy, even when it stings. This one was the latter. But you’re right that accuracy doesn’t require cruelty, and your reminder is a good one… not to soften the truth, but to make sure it remains precise rather than punitive.
Thank you, Doc, for reading me as a person and not just a voice on the page, and for offering a generosity that doesn’t dilute the thinking!
And thank you, Tamara, for how you respond, rather than react to what I write (and other people as well). I appreciate your clarification on "desires deferred" - it makes a difference in how I understand it. I like the questions you'd have asked about my deferrals, and think I'll sit down with those questions to see what comes up.
I respect, enormously, your desire for precision and not evasion, as a reason for being harder on yourself than on others. And I have plenty of experience of your capacity for kindness and gentleness, which is accurate without harshness. Thank you for being willing to use them with yourself as well as others.
You have never been just a voice on the page - or even now, just a voice. I never forget there is a person writing these essays and notes and stories. And that it is a person I've come to care for a great deal, and that you are someone I treasure as an essential part of my life. I do promise to try to never dilute the thinking! :))
What can I respond to this? Only my infinite gratitude and affection. Thank you, Doc!
I love this article Tamara. It really resonates with me. I’ve spent all of December feeling uneasy, feeling that I hadn’t given my best to 2025, feeling a little adrift. And your essay nailed the reasons why.
And you are right. It’s not unfamiliar. Maybe it’s triggered by the days closing in and the expectations of holiday cheer. Maybe it’s the feeling that you know the answer but the path still feels unclear.
Either way, I sense it’s good to sit with the feeling for a while and not pretend, as you so eloquently lay bare, that the arrival of January 1st will herald some kind of metamorphosis.
Maybe we look to the lessons of complexity theory. That would suggest the idea of preconceived big changes is pointless. It would advocate for abandoning the illusion of linear cause-effect relationships. The kind that feature in most self-help books.
“Just follow these 10 rules for life and you’re guaranteed amazing success in 2026!”.
Bullshit.
Instead we could test multiple small interventions to see what emerges, dialling up things that appear to be helpful and stopping things that don’t.
Treating the new year like an experiment with no real idea of the outcomes could be liberating. I’m going to give it a try.
I thank you for all your beautiful writing in 2025 and wish you a wonderful 2026.
This is a sort of non-clarity with integrity. Knowing the answer without yet knowing the route is a legitimate state, even though our culture treats it as a defect that must be resolved immediately. December sharpens that discomfort because it removes the illusion that time itself will do the work for us. It won’t. But neither does it demand dramatic conversion on a fixed date.
I’m sympathetic to your instinct to reject rule-based transformation. Life doesn’t respond well to guarantees, and cause-and-effect narratives flatter our need for control more than they respect reality. Small adjustments, made attentively and revised honestly, often change more than grand declarations because they engage feedback rather than fantasy. That’s what I try to do.
Thank you, dear Paul, for spending this year with my writing, and for meeting it with such thoughtfulness, as always! I wish you a 2026 that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but reveals itself slowly, in ways you can actually inhabit.
Your essay is unusually rigorous in how it treats time as a constraint system. I would add the idea of December as a compression test rather than a verdict. Like stress-testing a structure, it doesn’t tell you whether the design was noble or well-intentioned; it shows you what deforms under load. What buckles is information. The danger is misreading deformation as moral weakness instead of structural misallocation.
That’s why your refusal of resolutions feels correct. Resolutions optimize for intention; December exposes allocation. Where attention, courage, and desire were actually spent—not imagined, not rehearsed. That distinction runs cleanly through the piece, and it’s rare to see it articulated without sentimentality or self-absolution. But then, we expect that from you.
The choice of William Blake’s drawings is perfect. Blake understood pressure before productivity culture did, his figures always strain, compressed between vision and body, prophecy and bone. They look unfinished because they are mid-revelation. That mirrors your essay’s intelligence. You’re not aestheticising incompletion.
For me, this really does close the year. With calibration. It doesn’t ask me to become someone else, only to stop mislabeling motion as commitment and imagination as participation. I admire how you think here: precise, unsparing, but never performative. You don’t offer comfort; you offer accuracy. And at the end of a year, that’s the most usable gift there is.
Thank you, Tamara, for your precious mind.
I like this framing, Alexander, because it shifts responsibility without collapsing into blame. A compression test doesn’t ask whether the structure had good intentions; it asks whether the load was placed where it could be carried. When things bend, the reflex is self-indictment. But very often what failed was distribution. Too much weight on the wrong joints for too long.
I’m especially taken by your point about deformation carrying information. That’s something we tend to miss because we rush to correct it. Buckling is treated as error, when in fact it’s a diagnostic signal. It tells you where attention was overextended, where courage was rationed too thinly, where desire was outsourced to imagination instead of given a foothold in action. Ignoring that data in favour of renewed intention is how people repeat the same year with different stationery.
Of course I chose Blake! I value his drawings precisely because they resist completion. They don’t resolve vision into comfort. The strain remains visible. Revelation costs something bodily there; it’s not clean, not uplifting, not scalable. That incompleteness is so truthful! I wanted images that didn’t soothe the essay, only kept it honest. And I knew I would illustrate my essay with his drawings after I wrote my first paragraph.
I’m glad this felt like calibration. I didnt want closure. Calibration corrects direction while movement continues. And accuracy, as you say, is usable. Comfort is consumed quickly. Accuracy stays.
Thank you for reading me with such discernment! And for the beautiful compliment about my mind.
Of course you chose Blake! I know few people who have your flair in literature as well as in art.
“If you can meet with Triumph & Disaster, & treat those two imposters just the same” (Kipling).
I prefix my response with Rudyard’s philosophical wisdom, because he can, in a nutshell, write what would require of me several hours thought & thousands of words.
The visceral melancholy of your essay, Tamara, is something with which I’m too familiar.
The difference for me is that I tend to start a year at any time of day, & year. I’m intellectually beholden neither to solar nor lunar calendars. Not that my calendar juggling in any way questions or undermines the reality of what you describe. But it does help me live according to what I consider my priorities, rather than suffer the insolence of having to conform to the arbitrary & too often pointless timetables of others. For me, a new year naturally follows a major event, either in my life, or more externally. It deletes the rather artificial public EOY.
By calibrating my life around events important to me, my family & life, imposed chronologies dissolve.
I can do without the noise & the weeds of what too often passes for our culture.
Your essay is heady stuff. Thanks once more Tamara.
I like that you begin with Kipling as compression, a way of acknowledging that some recognitions arrive already distilled. And yet, what you do next matters more: you refuse to let the calendar dictate the terms under which those recognitions must occur.
What you’re describing is a reassertion of authorship over when meaning begins. To let a year start at an event rather than a date is to privilege consequence over convention. It’s a serious refusal to outsource orientation. Public chronologies are efficient; they synchronise us. But they’re blunt instruments for interior life. They flatten difference. They insist on simultaneity where none exists.
Anchoring life to events that actually change the stakes doesn’t negate December’s pressure so much as relocate it. The reckoning still happens, but it’s triggered by rupture, loss, arrival, decision, moments that genuinely reorder a life, not by a page turning. That’s discernment choosing signal over noise.
Your résistance to cultural weeds resonates. Much of what passes for collective meaning now is overgrown with instruction and undernourished in substance. I see stepping back from that as maintenance of attention.
Thank you, Russell, for reading my essay without demanding that it govern you, and for offering a way of living alongside it rather than inside its calendar!
By your evident thorough yet nuanced understanding of what I sought to express in my response, it’s clear why you’ve attracted so many genuine followers in short time. Further comment from me would be superfluous. (Once I establish residence on extra-antipodean shores, I hope to become a more substantial subscriber.)
Thank you so much, Russell!
You will not regret.
Tamara, your essay does something genuinely difficult. It refuses both consolation and performance. The way you frame December as a procedural, bored, unimpressed interrogation cuts through an entire industry of seasonal sentimentality. That image of time as an auditor with a clipboard names the experience with a clarity that makes it hard to hide behind mood or metaphor, and that’s a remarkable achievement.
I appreciate your insistence that unfinishedness is about deferred inhabitation, all the lives we carried in imagination and never committed to in the body. That’s a deep insight, and a culturally urgent one. We live in a world that rewards optionality and calls it freedom, that mistakes rehearsal for progress and then wonders why December feels like a reckoning. You articulate, with unsettling accuracy, how imagination becomes a holding pattern, how “later” turns from generosity into quiet self-betrayal.
Your example of reorganising the bookshelf instead of reading it is devastating in its ordinariness. It captures the way we touch our lives indirectly, managing, optimising, curating, while avoiding the one move that would actually change the stakes, which is a universal idea. That moment alone could stand as a parable for an entire generation trained to stay impressive rather than exposed.
For me, that truth is that I’ve been calling preparation “being responsible” when it was really a way to postpone disappointment, mine and other people’s. I stayed in motion to avoid choosing, and in doing so, let time choose for me. Your essay didn’t invent that recognition, but it cornered it so cleanly that it couldn’t slip away this year.
I also appreciate your resistance to aestheticising melancholy. That warning feels necessary. December sadness has become a vibe; you insist it be treated instead as data. Not something to decorate, but something to listen to, even when it’s boring, repetitive, or unshareable. That insistence on sobriety is one of the essay’s moral strengths.
What you’ve written doesn’t tell the reader what to do next, and that restraint feels intentional and earned.
This is an end-of-year reflection AND refusal to let time be neutral. You’ve managed to give language to a pressure many people feel but can’t talk about without turning it into either shame or slogans. That clarity is rare. Thank you for writing something that doesn’t soothe, doesn’t scold, and doesn’t pretend the question will go away just because the calendar turns. You’re one of the kind, Tamara.
Fascinating to see the distinction you draw between unfinishedness and deferred inhabitation. That gap is where so much contemporary exhaustion lives. We’re trained to keep options alive long past the point where they can still be lived honestly, and then we are surprised when time feels punitive rather than neutral. But time doesn’t judge us; it’s simply indifferent to our rehearsals. It records where weight actually landed.
Preparation can be ethical, but it can also become a socially approved way to delay exposure, especially when other people are implicated. Staying in motion looks considerate. Choosing, by contrast, creates friction. It disappoints. It reveals priorities that can’t be smoothed over with good explanations later. When we avoid that discomfort, we outsource agency to drift.
Your point about treating melancholy as information matters. Feelings that repeat rarely ask to be styled; they ask to be read. December sadness, when stripped of its seasonal gloss, is often remarkably plain. It’s not poetic. It’s procedural. And that plainness is precisely what makes it useful, if we don’t rush to decorate it into something shareable.
You’re right that my essay doesn’t instruct. That restraint is respect. Telling people what to do next often relieves them too quickly of the work of discernment. Pressure clarifies, but it doesn’t prescribe. What comes after recognition has to be negotiated individually, in circumstances that no essay can standardise.
Thank you, Clara, for engaging so thoughtfully, and for the lovely compliment!
I think this might be my first comment on this app, but it feels necessary. Thank you, Tamara, for writing this piece. It made me feel both uncomfortably exposed and oddly cozy at the same time, for reasons to me mostly currently unknown, but I really appreciate it. Thank you!
I’m very moved you chose this essay for a first comment.
That combination you describe makes sense to me. Feeling exposed without being attacked usually means something accurate has been named without being moralised. When language doesn’t rush to fix you, judge you, or improve you, it can create a strange sense of safety even as it strips away a few defences. That’s often what people mistake for coziness: relief at not being managed.
Thank you, Adéla, for stepping into the conversation, especially with that honesty! First comments are a small risk, and I’m grateful you did it.
Beautifully written! I will read this more than once, after my dense and heavy freeze-response-to-everything carries me forward for another few days ;) but glad to ditch the weight of the proverbial 'clean slate' before January 1. Thank you! ❤️
Thank you, Helen, I’m glad you named the freeze because it’s one of the most misunderstood responses we have.
Freeze isn’t laziness or avoidance as many would rush to name. It’s the nervous system saying, this is too much to absorb all at once. In that sense, rereading later is timing. Insight arrives when the body is ready to receive it, not when the calendar demands it. January’s obsession with starting fresh often ignores this entirely, mistaking pressure for momentum.
I also think there’s something sane about refusing the fantasy of the “clean slate”. Slates are for classrooms and courtrooms, not for lived lives! We don’t erase experience; we carry it differently. Letting go of the demand to be unburdened by January 1st can actually return weight where it belongs as texture. Something earned, not something to purge.
Move forward slowly if that’s what your system requires! Slowness, when chosen rather than imposed, is a form of care that keeps you intact for clarity to catch up.
Thank you for reading, and for trusting your own pace with honesty!
I really enjoyed how you shifted the year-end mindset from the marketable time of renewal to the year-end review one does owing to the realization that another tally on your lifeline has expired… devastating.
December has the quality of the cruelest part of the left-brain that holds you to account with precise accounting but fails to return the insights it gains back to the holistic right-side of the brain. This makes for an uncomfortable review that lacks voltage, but instead you are left with a spreadsheet-worth of neatly categorized ideas, complete with structure and the illusion of a well thought-out review. Yes, you have all the data one needs to make an effective plan for the next quarter… but it feels like something is missing, surely this is evident in the almost comical lack of sustained follow-through. I am certainly not taking umbrage with that desire to gather the facts and evidence to interrogate in that liminal gloaming of the calendar, but we seem to be ineffectual at using this year-end period for something valuable. For me, that effort to interrogate is noble, necessary and illuminating and yet it is only part of the effort.
You wrote, “We are desperate to make the year say something coherent, as if coherence could be retrofitted after the fact, as if a clean arc might redeem long stretches of inertia, hesitation, or avoidance, and as if naming the lesson, preferably in a sentence tidy enough to share, might compensate for the harder, less photogenic truth that the lesson was understood intellectually and still not lived.” Jamming sense into stories after the fact is a delightful part of the human psyche, we are rather good it! But it is rather flawed, and our capacity to make the story coherent is why most eyewitness testimonies are unreliable, it is why grandad’s fishing tales are unbelievable, and its often why those efforts to derive a “lesson” from a breakup is more arduous— our meaning making is a script and one that is not to dissimilar from the yearly pilgrimage to through December’s interrogation.
That lacking is something I have felt for most of my life. When I read this essay I am reminded of the powerful quality of reflecting to recognize resonance. There is a potency I seem to forget (possibly because I am deluged with the need to be cheery and in my exhaustion I forget) the usefulness of quiet contemplation to check if the calibration of your year was close, distant, or perfectly aligned to those desires and wants that is felt in the body. And I don’t mean this in that auditing sense of checking if a = b, reconciling the goals with the results and giving one a final grade for the year, I am talking about the need to take what you have measured and sit with it and feel it, determine if you actually value what it was you subjected yourself to in those violent-adjacent ideas of pressure, exposure and compression that life throws at you. This takes the story off the page and into the body. And this where I feel I am lacking the skill to turn fact into insight.
Because there is something supremely unflattering about trying to measure everything, to ascribe meaning to all that has transpired and then having no cognitive capacity to do anything except feel miserable about the lack of movement. I have found that the effort of marking, measuring and doing a detailed audit of the previous 11 months to gain coherence is not the only technique to gain insight and wisdom—it has its place, sure— but as you say the greatest teacher is often “unpolished honesty that doesn’t arrive on demand and cannot be gamed”. That state of comprehension one experiences when the mind isn’t grasping at answers, but instead is given space to interrogate, unencumbered by fitting into a specific structure or scaffolding, this is where some of the greatest ideas are found. It is this marrying of measurement and introspection that I see as the grand exercise of becoming. Because doing the performative December audit to determine the January resolutions is not a review, it is a circular process that needs to bring the insights back into presence. It isn’t enough just to make the lists, tick off the goals, and develop the life or business plan—you also need to find space to really inhale the meaning of the story you have cobbled together lest it be meaningless data that you use to tell yourself you did something meaningful to prepare for the next 12 months.
Tamara, you and I discussed this the other day, but I see one of the challenges as the lack patience. We want to show movement but don’t have the time or energy to actually generate momentum. Instead we do a performance of creation (I feel this all the time in corporate life: the illusion of doing) rather than the act of transformation. We have deified the efficient path and forgotten the clumsy, wobbly, meandering path for fear that we aren’t doing enough or are being perceived as lazy. But sitting in meaningful silence isn’t laziness or abdicating your responsibility to hustle, it is the place from which the totality of your insight can be found. You measure the year, give it the story AND THEN the real work begins.
We certainly don’t want to disincentivize people’s predilection for aspirational planning, and the effort and striving that can happen around December — what I think we need to give people is the additional ability to slowly analyze what it all means not just between the ears, but in our totality. What you achieved, what you failed to achieve, what you started and what you ended are all good to take note of… and then what?
“December doesn’t follow up, doesn’t offer guidance, doesn’t check whether you acted on what you noticed; it simply steps aside and leaves you alone with what surfaced, entirely indifferent to whether you turn that recognition into change or carry it, unresolved, straight into the next year.”
This where I think we are bereft — at least I know I have been when we actually look at the life we have lived over a span of months with precisions, what are we left with? When I am left in the threshold of what was and what is to come next, rather than analyze with precision and use that earned insight, I seem to rush to the next step of piling my calendar, lists, and goals with stuff to do almost to absolve myself of the harsh work of reviewing what was desired and what was inertia. It strikes me as important to make that distinction—between what I maintain because of inertia and what I am aiming for to achieve my desire. Realistically, I tend to just take the path of least resistance and think about the future and take only a fraction of that insight into January. And you named it almost immediately, if I didn’t add to the to-do list and start conjuring the resolution for that future desired state, I would default to that other tried and true technique: I would anesthetize.
You left us with your approach to the post-December reckoning as a question imbued with curiosity. I am taking the insight gained from your essay and trying my best to integrate what I witnessed—slowly and with genuine care. I also want to take heed of moments where I have anesthetized and look for the miscalibration: not to excoriate myself (a favourite pastime, sadly) but to represent that felt experience not as a performative output but a relic to be meditated on and interrogated with the voltage of the body and the mind: to often I just let the mind make the decision on the veracity of my past efforts. I want the body to join the effort. I doubt this will yield an explosive rupturous next phase where I will have some shareable transcendent experience, but I expect a subtle shift in trajectory—away from performance and towards a deeper insight weaving together the observed and the felt.
The shift from renewal to review is devastating precisely because it strips the season of its cosmetics. Renewal flatters the ego; review confronts finitude. One is aspirational theatre, the other an arithmetic, and when the latter appears without interpretation, it can feel merciless. A tally on the lifeline doesn’t ask how hard you tried but it simply notes that another unit has passed.
I like your sharp observation about the accounting mindset, a year-end review that remains purely analytical produces something eerily familiar to anyone who has lived inside corporate or institutional systems: immaculate dashboards, colour-coded insights, action points that look convincing and then mysteriously fail to generate traction. You have all the information required to “do better”, and yet nothing moves. That failure is a category error; data without digestion does becomes weight.
You’re right that we are remarkably skilled at retrofitting coherence. We do it instinctively. Cognitive science has shown repeatedly that memory is reconstructive rather than archival, we don’t retrieve events, we rebuild them. That’s why eyewitness testimony is unreliable, why family stories mutate with each retelling, why breakups get re-scripted into moral fables that bear little resemblance to what was actually felt in the moment. December invites the same manoeuvre… we turn a year into a story because stories are easier to carry than contradictions. But coherence is not the same as truth, and explanation is not the same as integration.
Where your comment becomes especially important is in the distinction you draw between recognition and resonance. Recognition is mental, yes, this happened; yes, I see the pattern. Resonance is bodily… does this life, as lived, feel aligned with what I value when no one is watching? That second question cannot be answered in a spreadsheet. It requires slowness, and slowness is precisely what the season refuses us. Cheer must be performed, momentum simulated, closure declared, all while the body asks for withdrawal and consolidation.
Measurement alone can leave you flat, even despondent, because it exposes discrepancy without offering orientation. When everything is assessed and nothing is absorbed, misery is a predictable outcome. The missing move, and this is where I think your insight deepens my essay, is the transition from assessment to inhabitation. Not “what happened?” but “how did living this way actually feel, once the noise drops?”
There are concrete examples of this failure everywhere. People leave jobs with immaculate postmortems and walk straight into roles that reproduce the same exhaustion. Relationships end with beautifully reasoned lessons that never alter the chooser’s instincts. Businesses conduct quarterly reviews that generate impressive documentation and identical mistakes. In each case, analysis occurred; transformation did not. Why? Because the body was never consulted. The cost was never felt, only named.
Your reflection on patience cuts to the cultural nerve, and to mine. We confuse visible motion with progress and stillness with negligence. The clumsy, uneven, uncertain path has fallen out of favour because it cannot be defended easily. Silence produces nothing to show. Yet silence is often where integration happens as recalibration. A barely perceptible shift in what you can no longer tolerate. A subtle reweighting of attention. Those changes reveal themselves later, through different choices made almost without commentary.
What you say about rushing into January is painfully accurate. Lists, goals, calendars are often acts of self-soothing. They reassure us that we are “doing something” when what we are actually doing is avoiding the harder confrontation between desire and inertia. And when planning fails to numb that discomfort, anesthesia becomes the backup strategy because we are human and exhausted….
I’m impressed by the care with which you approach the question I left open. You don’t look for a breakthrough or a shareable insight but for a more honest internal collaboration — mind and body in dialogue rather than hierarchy. That is the real antidote to the circularity you describe. Don’t abandon planning, slow it down enough that meaning can catch up!
The subtle shift you anticipate is, I suspect, the only kind that lasts. No rupture, no reinvention, but a change in how seriously you take what you already know when it registers somatically rather than intellectually. Moving away from performance and toward participation rarely looks impressive. It does, however, change the direction of travel.
Thank you for this, Adam, for its intelligence, its patience, and its refusal to accept clarity without consequence! You always extend my essays in unbelievable ways.
I think one of the more valuable parts of being a Museguided reader is running your own perceptual lenses and heuristics through the Tamara logic and see what the synthesis yields. Your writing invites the reader to do a review in ways that are both subtle and encouraging. At least to me. The weight of the logic and consideration you put into a consideration of something like the atmosphere of December, makes me wonder — often as I am exposed to something entirely new — if I could with a refinement of my own logic pathways. The answer, even if it is in contradiction to the Museguided reframe, is invariable yes: it was valuable to run those scripts again. I tend to learn something everything time.
And I find that happens most frequently in these comments exchanges. I appreciate your care and willingness to continue the discussion with the same depth as you use to conjure your essay. As always, an absolute pleasure to discuss these matters!
This means a lot because you’re describing exactly the type of reading I write for, even if I can never quite say that out loud without it sounding grander than it is.
What you call “running your own perceptual lenses through the Tamara logic” is, to my mind, the opposite of persuasion. Not adopting a frame but stress-testing your own? If the synthesis holds, great! If it cracks or contradicts what I’ve written, that’s just as valuable. Thought that survives contact with another mind becomes sturdier, not weaker. We are the best example.
I’m glad you consider contradiction as part of the value. Agreement teaches very little. Friction, when it’s thoughtful rather than reactive, sharpens discernment. If reading something new doesn’t force a re-run of your internal scripts, even briefly, it probably hasn’t reached the level of consequence. Learning, at least the kind that lasts, almost always involves recalibration rather than conversion.
And yes, the comments matter enormously to me for this reason. An essay is a proposition; the exchanges are where it becomes relational, where ideas are tested against lived experience, temperament, and résistance. I don’t see that as an add-on to the work, it IS part of the work. Staying in the conversation at the same depth is a way of honouring the seriousness with which others are engaging.
I love that you are always curious rather than comfortable. That willingness to keep running the scripts, especially when they don’t resolve neatly, is amazing! Never change that!
I am speechless… I’ll come back to this. I just need to let everything sink in and comprehend that this synchronicity is the Universe’s way of telling me I am exactly where I am supposed to be and all I did this month is something to be proud of.
Take the pause! It’s doing more work than any immediate interpretation could.
I’ll gently challenge one part of what you wrote, not to negate it, but to refine it. I don’t think moments like this are the universe reassuring us that we are where we are supposed to be. That framing can slip into comfort too quickly. What feels more accurate to me is this: you are where you actually are, and for once you are not trying to outrun that fact. That’s the relief. Not destiny, but alignment with reality.
Pride doesn’t have to come from visible outcomes to be earned. Sometimes it comes from staying with something enough to let it register, resisting the urge to reframe, rush, or redeem the moment with meaning before it’s finished speaking. Letting things sink in is a form of respect for your own experience.
If this month asked something quieter of you, like patience, endurance, restraint, honesty without resolution, those don’t announce themselves loudly, but they count. Often more than the things we’re trained to celebrate.
Come back to it when you’re ready. Nothing here is perishable. Thank you, dear Beatrice, for trusting the pause!
J’adore: “Alignment with reality”. 🙏🏼
Yes, I too just rearranged my book collection. But looking at our shelves of books tells us who we are, sorta. And those that no longer fit who I have become, out they go. Yup, I'm slightly queasy about this whole new year thing. Eating as many cookies as possible before I deny myself again (not denial, limit setting?) But sorting out the books to let go of some? That feels good. Oh, and your question? Oh my!
Letting go of books feels cleaner than letting go of habits. Objects are cooperative; they leave when asked. Selves are more stubborn. Still, shelves do act as a kind of inventory, not of who we aspire to be, but of what once held our attention in order to earn space. Releasing a book that no longer fits is an admission that you’ve moved, even if the movement was subtle.
I smiled at the cookie confession, because that wobble between indulgence and restraint is exactly where language starts doing gymnastics. We rename denial as discipline, discipline as care, care as intention… sometimes wisely, sometimes defensively. What matters less is which word wins and more whether the gesture actually responds to what you need, rather than to the calendar’s demand for symbolic purity.
Thank you, Michele, for sharing this moment so candidly! There’s a lot of honesty tucked into that queasiness, and I appreciate you bringing it into my room.
And thank you, Tamara, how quickly and thoughtfully you responded. I went out to write, just couldn't, and came home to your actual reply. I feel so attended to. How you do all of this? Yes, shelves are easier than selves. Sigh...
I’m glad you felt that, being attended to matters more than any clever sentence ever could.
There are moments when writing doesn’t happen because something is rearranging itself internally and doesn’t want to be rushed into form yet. Going out to write and coming back empty-handed is often the sign that attention moved inward instead of outward. That counts, even if it leaves no page behind to prove it. It happens to me all the time. I don’t consider myself blocked.
And yes….. shelves yield easily :)
Selves don’t.
They resist because they’re made of habits, attachments, half-kept promises, and tenderness we’re still unsure how to hold. Reorganising them takes time, patience, and a tolerance for not knowing what stays. That could be a good essay to write…. about selves and shelves.
As for how I do all of this, I don’t think of it as doing. I think of it as staying present where something real is happening and responding before it evaporates. I am also disciplined. Attention, when offered sincerely, creates a loop. You gave it first by reading carefully. I’m simply meeting it where it landed.
Thank you, Michele! :)
I shared this essay because I too find in the metaphor of December a scary recognition that once more I wasted opportunities to put dreams and hopes into operation. I love the comment that openness is not freedom. It made me sit up. I take it that being open to possibilities and opportunities while informative that alone is not enough. We must incarnate our desire with solid action. A focus of attention that requires the discipline make a dream come true. Great job Tom
Thank you for sharing it, Tom, and for naming the unease without trying to neutralise it!
Possibility can inform us, but it can also sedate us. When everything remains open, nothing has to be risked. The real threshold isn’t between dreaming and acting, but between wanting without consequence and wanting that accepts friction, disappointment, and irreversibility.
Action is what gives openness weight. Without some form of constraint, desire stays abstract, and abstraction is comfortable precisely because it never has to answer for results. Attention, when concentrated, is less about self-control than about consent, agreeing to let one thing matter more than the others, even temporarily, even imperfectly.
December doesn’t accuse us of having dreams; it asks whether we allowed any of them to change how we behaved on an ordinary day. That’s a harder, more honest measure than success or failure.
To paraphrase a wag dreaming is fine but don’t forget to give them legs after sleeping on it I amend the statement to dreaming of a castle in the air is fine as long as you build a foundation for it. THH