A Year to Become
Last year we learned to keep. We stood watch over what was left when the larger structures groaned and gave way. We mended fences, tended fires, and remembered how to carry a good weight inside the walls of a home. We did not flinch when the winds turned sharp. We kept our posts through the modern world’s ceaseless anti-season of unraveling and, in doing so, we prepared the ground for what comes next.
The year ahead is a summons.
There is something deeper stirring now for you here at the turning of the old wheel, the dawning of a new year. The time of keeping has given way to a time of growing, a year of becoming. Not all at once, and not for the sole sake of ambition, but through the quiet decision to become useful, to become more rooted, to become the kind of person others rely on in the winter-dark hours of the year.
Most of us would be better off if we stopped trying to be happy and tried to be useful. Casey B. Head
The obstacles to this resolution will come early and come often. There will be the steady drag of convenience, the neon magnetic pull toward ease, the chorus of voices offering clever detachment from all that roots you well. These are solvents that thin the soul when indulged. Then there is the constant pang of nostalgia, which flatters but does not equip. You’ll see this in messages like “This is what they took from you” or “The world you grew up in no longer exists” without any tangible call to action, to stay and to labor. The temptation of this year will be to drift just enough to be spared the weight, to stay near the work without quite taking it on.
The year will not carry itself however.
The door that wards the cold will not close itself.
The tools on which you depend will not stay sharp in the dark of the shed.
Becoming begins when you hear that good green call, block out the screaming neon noise, and choose not to look away.
There is something in the bones of winter that calls a man or a woman to show up with both hands ready. The work of the year will not feel revolutionary. You have likely been sold that it will however. It will instead feel repetitive and, if done correctly, rhythmic like splitting wood. A person becomes necessary by showing up again and again, in the same place, with the same care.
It may look like repairing the broken fence before someone else notices it.
It may look like reaching out first when a friendship goes quiet.
It may look like initiating the traditions of your childhood for which you yearn without waiting for some unspoken permission.
It may be your voice that calls the family to the table, or your hands that pack the meal for the neighbor who has no one. Despite what our literature and movies and talking heads will tell you, becoming is rarely some kind of pyrrhic leap, some singular moment. It is a gradual giving of the self to the work you were already near, but had not yet fully claimed. Becoming is the slow process of growing indispensable to your home, your community, your place.
Luckily, the pattern of the year invites this sort of posture. It reflects it, in a way. We have passed the longest night, but the cold remains. The light has begun its gradual return, but the mornings are still quiet and grey. If you are reading this, last year you likely felt the old pillars of the world groaning, and you were called to locate something sturdy and enduring enough from which to build.
You answered that call.
You kept what could be kept.
Now the light is returning and with it comes the next step.
The season itself instructs us: do not mistake the turning for a completion. Our culture mistakenly sees so much of time as linear: you start the year, you end the year, then you start a new year. It is a flattened sense of time, a habit of thinking shaped by deadlines, calendars, fiscal quarters, and academic terms. It teaches us to measure life in starts and stops, in goals crossed off and boxes checked. The imagination behind it is not cyclical but stacked: one line atop another, neat rows of beginnings and ends, always marching forward. The good green pattern of the seasons teaches a different rhythm however. The trees do not begin again on January first. The soil does not suddenly yield. You cannot mark a hard reset on a pasture, a child, a marriage, a place. You coax what wants to return. The old growth feeds the new. The ground is still frozen, but the thaw will come. The days lengthen by degrees. This is the appointed time for steady hands and steady hearts. Like the year, you are not reborn: you carry what came before. You keep it all but now it is a matter of fully realizing the good that has been kept and fully embodying it.
Yes, there is the invitation that January offers you: become. Not through some dramatic spectacle, but through fidelity. Become more father, more mother, more neighbor, more keeper of the good things entrusted to you through many small victories and an oak-known steadiness.
Double down.
Let this be the year your name holds weight in a room because you have given yourself to whatever you chose last year fully. Let this be the year your home grows stronger because you awoke when it was cold and early and no one else had started the fire. Let this be the year you take on what is yours to carry, without fanfare, without delay.
The turning has already come and the good green pattern stirs beneath.
The light is returning.
To take your place.
Let this year be the year you become.
