Better Questions for 2025

A special New Year journaling prompt

Hello,

The midwinter period is almost over. It began, for me, with watching for an invisible sunset on Whitstable beach with my very dearest people. There was a bonfire in the garden, a candle to welcome in the next morning’s dawn. I then travelled across the country to join the solstice celebrations at All Cannings Longbarrow, and watched the winter sunrise light up the inside of this very recent take on an ancient tomb. Then I flew to Spain for a family Christmas in the sun. It has been a midwinter of rekindling old connections and making new ones.

But now we turn to face the New Year. We mark it quietly in our house, tending a fire until the year turns, listening to sounds of parties and fireworks rise up across the town. I’ve had my years of revelery and I no longer crave it. Instead, New Year feels quite solemn to me, quite momentous. After nursing the sun for the last twelve days, keeping it alive in candle flames and string lights, we get ready to release it back into the new world.

What a brave new world it is set to be. I can’t help but feel unsettled as I approach it. It’s difficult to know what this year will bring, as vast social, ecological and political changes roll in. Between us, we will find a way to walk through it.

And yet this year, as every other year, I’m bombarded with the same old messages everywhere I turn: new year, new you. I am being pedalled diets that we know don’t work, ways to cram in more work in an age of burnout, and mindset hacks that perpetuate the myth that we can all be the main character of the world. As the year dies, it is part of my weariness to witness this all over again. We know better. We can do better.

So, I’m offering a simple journaling prompt to close 2024: ten better questions to mark this transition, and to meet the New Year with gentleness. Ten invitations to experience the world more richly and to find softness amid the tumult.

A final, important, reminder: we live in continuous time, through thousands of endings and beginnings, thousands of rebirths. If life looks bleak from this standpoint, then remember that it will continue to move on. Don’t put too much stock in this one, arbitrary date. Believe instead in your capacity for growth, for wisdom, and for survival.