Simmering

On starting the year slowly, and why we shouldn't rush into making our New Year's resolutions and intentions.

In the first week of 2024, I messaged a friend anxiously about my lack of online presence and direction thus far this year. How I had yet to join in with the onslaught of Instagram posts about resolutions, goals, ‘ins and outs’, and annual reviews. How self-conscious I felt; how I was worried that I was starting the year with apathy and inertia. How I was worried about falling ‘behind’.

“I’m OK thanks, just trying not to panic that I haven’t posted anything about the New Year yet, or my goals. I feel like I need to simmer a little, you know? It’s only the third!”

A few days later, she quoted me in her Reels, like I was one of her favourite authors or podcasters.

(Her name is Lauren, by the way, and she has her own Substack if you’re feeling curious!)

I had forgotten I had used that word. ‘Simmer’. It tumbled out of my brain and into WhatsApp without me realising what I had said. It turns out that she had not stopped thinking about it all week; I, on the other hand, had forgotten I’d said it entirely, and took a moment to realise the person she had been inspired by was me.

I’d missed my own epiphany moment.

What a word though. To simmer. To just let the year do its thing for a bit. Leave it on the hob, like a stock, and cook a little before you go to town with all the flavours and extra ingredients that make it taste great: the oils, the spices, the herbs, the seasonings. 

The things that really *make* a year don’t happen instantly at the start of the process: it’s all in the preparation. You’ve got stuff to do first if you’re going to do it properly. Don’t kick off with something raw or ill-thought-through, or you might end up with something inedible, undigestible, bitter. Give yourself a better chance of making something delicious and worth the wait; do your chopping, your slow heating, and your marinading.

It’s very nearly February, and I’m still ruminating over my intentions for the year ahead. ‘Intentions’ feels softer and more realistic than ‘goals’. Goals have KPIs; I want gentle, indecipherable growth that unfurls when you’re not paying attention and something that feels less like failure if you go off on a tangent.

I have drafts of ‘ins and outs’ waiting to be unleashed onto Instagram and lost within all the others, ignored and scrolled past. I have half-formed ideas, disorganised folders, and to-do lists that have spilled over from 2023. Unfinished business.

I love the prospect of a New Year and a fresh start. To think that come December 2024, I’ll know what I don’t yet. I’ll have new memories to look back on, new lessons and new emotional lesions to soothe. 

But the idea that, on the first minute on the first day of a year you’ll know who you want to be next, and what you want to do – when the weeks beforehand are a blur of decadence and harried festivities, where calendars are cast away, a no man’s land, a fog, a limbo – is unreasonable.

When we’re sixteen or seventeen, we’re told to decide what and who we want to be for life, fill out our UCAS forms and job applications, embark on apprenticeships, and choose our eternal path. We are told that This Is It – that we have to decide what we want to do forever when we are still growing, filling out our clothes and making messy mistakes.

I only started to feel like I was finally turning into who I was even remotely supposed to be when I was 24, a year into being a young professional and fresh out of the breakup of breakups, six whole years after being launched into adulthood.

How can we decide what the rest of our lives will look and feel like when we’re barely a fifth of the way through? 

And so, how can we decide what we want the year to bring us when we’re mere moments into it, and we don’t know how it will change us? How can we be so quick to decide what will define us across months where more than just the seasons change? How can we expect ourselves to want the same things that we wanted when we were a whole year younger?

This isn’t to say the great January reset isn’t a good idea. I like the promise of it all. But I’ll be trying to keep my intentions open-ended; ideas that will hopefully be carried through the year with the ebb and flow of life. Values, if you will, that I’ll keep close to my heart like talismans to keep me grounded when the waters get choppy, or the compass starts spinning a little too wildly.

I’ll ease off the pressure to spend these remaining first few weeks of the year contemplating my time ahead. After all, I’ve had my tax return to do, and the work that I left for January Jo to complete (foolishly. Curses.). Add to that the mental turbulence that a New Year can bring; the pressure, the emotion, the dark evenings and mornings, the teetering boulder of depression waiting to be pushed over the edge. It’s a lot.

I’ll let myself simmer for a little while longer. I’ll know when I’m ready.

And if you like this concept, I wrote a poem about it - you can find it on my Instagram grid.

Photo by cottonbro studio