A Different Way To Start The Year

For the longest time, the start of a new year always felt emotionally charged for me.

It has always felt loaded with pressure and a heavy demand to get it right.

As a result, January became a proving ground.

New routines, tighter habits, clearer goals, all meant to set me up for the year I hoped would finally match the picture in my head.

And then, as so many of you can probably relate, life would interrupt.

The habits faded, the plan bent, and I found myself disappointed and frustrated with myself.

What hurt wasn’t that things didn’t go as planned.

What hurt was how quickly unmet expectations turned into self-judgment.

After enough years of repeating this cycle, something shifted.

I didn’t stop wanting growth and expansion, but I stopped demanding the year look a certain way in order to feel okay with myself and the world around me.

I realized the real pain point wasn’t disruption.

It was my relationship with expectation and how it turned normal disruption into personal failure.

So now, I approach the start of a new year differently.

I still have goals and aspirations for the year—one of them being my book, Unstriving, that comes out in September.

But I stop demanding the year looks a certain way, and I simply focus on accepting what's in front of me instead of arguing with it.

Looking back, those moments have shaped and expanded my life more than any New Year's resolution has.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

I think we struggle because we turn life happening into evidence that we’re failing.

Unmet expectations stop being information and start becoming judgment.

For me, this shift has undoubtedly made life more enjoyable.

While there are still plenty of unmet expectations, there's also much more inner peace as there's less resistance and therefore—less suffering.

So as this new year begins, and you think about what you want your life to look like, I hope you remember this....

Life has more ways than you can imagine to move you toward what matters the most.

Your job isn’t to control every step or figure it all out ahead of time.

Your job is to keep an open heart and meet what’s here and let life work with you, not against you.

As always, I’m rooting for you. We’re in this together.

— Caleb