Ask What Makes You Come Alive
A reflection on the year and my word for 2025
Unless the writing gods descend on me in a sudden and galvanizing flash of light, this is my last post of 2024. It is also a time of planning and reflection, of making sense - or at least beauty - of the past year.
When I reflected on how to do that, I thought - what better than my own little florilegium? I was introduced to the idea of florilegia years ago, through the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. From the Latin roots flos (flower) and legere (to gather), a florilegium is essentially a bouquet of quotes, originally a medieval-era collection of Christian writings or, aptly, a collection of plant illustrations.1 (Check out this episode for more detail.) I have a habit of highlighting meaningful quotes in books (and, nerdily, transcribing them in my journal with citations), so I thought that for today’s post, I would go back through my reading and writing from the year, creating my own little bouquet of quotes from others and unpublished poems/lines/quips of my own, peppered with commentary throughout.
Well, as I sat down to do so, pulling out my journal from late 2023 into early 2024, I was struck. Struck by what I learned then, and what I’m working on now, and how freakin’ similar they are. I wondered - how much of our lives are spent re-learning the same lessons over, and over, and over?
Maybe this is my work. Learning, unlearning, failing, forgetting, feeling sad and courageous and small and loved and proud. Being messy, nonlinear. Experiencing.
Is there a beauty to this fallibility? I choose to believe so. It’s a homecoming so deep my chest knows it. It’s in my throat and my eyes as I watch the gentle mist make everything soft outside.
I started 2024 with a break-up. Looking back, I’m impressed with the clarity with which I journaled about what we often call “conflicting” emotions. What’s interesting is that I no longer find them conflicting. Who says I can’t experience love and doubt and gratitude and grief and the pains of contorting myself into a box that was never meant to hold me?
I chose a word for the year in 2024. That word was untethering. This is what I wrote.
January 15, 2024
“Untethering” is my word of 2024. Like the yogic aparigraha, it is an exuberant nonattachment. It means that this morning, as I watch the pink sky turn to blue over the snow-capped Olympics, as early waves break against icy rocks and seagulls siren their morning calls, I will love it until joy leaks through my eyes, and I will accept that it is not mine to own, that one day I can choose to leave and love it just as much, and trust that there is something better for me elsewhere.
We spend so much of our lives tethering ourselves to things. Perceived job security. A familiar person. Aspects of our identities that we will spend money on and put blinders up to remain unchallenged.
Untethering invites the trust that you are already whole; the strength to let go (Doesn’t that seem paradoxical? Yet nothing is more true); the courage to risk changing your heart and mind, and disappointing some people.
It’s uncertainty if you can do something but knowing that you’re brave enough to try, and that even if you fail, everything will be okay.
In the days after that break-up, I wrote about what I learned, how I felt, what I wanted now and in the future. I wrote about a challenging trail run I did, something I hadn’t done much of while in that partnership: “My legs are tired, but I feel so good,” I wrote. “I feel like ME.”
As I reflect on 2024, I’m thinking about the things that make me feel bright. I feel bright when I perform, teach, or facilitate something of importance to me; when I coach an individual into closer communion with themselves; when I am in deep flow teaching yoga. I feel bright when I tell a joke and make a whole room laugh, when I make music so earnest I lose track of time.
These are some of my moments of closest connection to Self and to others. I can’t help but think of that Howard Thurman quote: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
So that’s it - my word of the year for 2025: ALIVE. In the new year, I will make goals and plans and share some updates, all centered on this theme of aliveness. For now, I will just practice. Untethering and being alive and re-learning those lessons that keep bringing me back to myself.
Ok y’all, I know we learned in 7th grade not to cite Wikipedia, but it’s 8am on a Sunday morning, and this is the most efficient and objective-sounding source I’ve encountered. Please feel free to message me with other, more robust sources if you know of any! For now, see the Wikipedia article here, and/or listen to the podcast episode linked above.
Love the part about feeling "bright." It's not an adjective I would've thought up on my own, but you're absolutely right - when I'm doing things that make me feel alive and like myself, it does feel like brightness!