I took some time off toward the end of 2025. It wasn’t the kind of holiday respite where I spent time catching up on reading or planning out my year ahead. For once, I actually made a conscious effort to stop striving and stop envisioning my life as a “project” in progress.
I spent the liminal days between Christmas and New Year by the sea absorbed in the sand, surf, and a wide, unapologetic sky. I unplugged in a way that felt mildly rebellious. I didn’t make resolutions or set goals. Nor did I draft my usual tidy list of “intentions” pretending not to be attached to the outcome.
Instead, I watched.
For days I sat watching pods of humpback whales from the shore as they surfaced and disappeared again, indifferent to my presence. I tracked patrols of pelicans riding invisible air currents. I witnessed turtle hatchlings trying to make their way to their salty motherland under the watchful gaze of ospreys searching for their next meal. I saw dolphins playing in the shallows and ravens slicing sharp silhouettes across the sky.
Each day I felt privileged to bear witness to a small parade of ordinary miracles: a confetti of butterflies drifting on a puff of air, dragonflies with wings like living crystals of light, and the tiniest hummingbirds—no bigger than bumblebees. It was as if each sun-filled day had decided to wake up with wings. I let the rhythm of waves crashing on shore pull me backward into childhood, remembering weekends at my grandparents’ seaside home, where time stretched and adults left me to my beach combing bliss.
In the stillness of those days, something subtle but decisive happened.
The longer I stayed present, the less interested I became in accomplishing anything.
Normally this time of year would find me drafting plans, refining goals, setting intentions, and interrogating myself about productivity in a suspiciously judgemental tone. But this time, the need to achieve dissolved. In its place came a deeper urge to listen. Not to obligations, preferences or ambitions. But to what my body needed and to life itself, including the daily chorus of crickets heralding dusk.
Life, it turns out, was speaking to me everywhere. It was quiet, unhurried, and consistent.
Every encounter that week seemed to be saying: abundance doesn’t arrive in a hurried world. Abundance is not achieved through acceleration, it is revealed through attention.
I found abundance everywhere when I slowed down long enough to notice. The living world seemed to be telling me, “All of life is already here for you.”
It is found in the sunrises, sunsets, and the moon pulling at the tides. It is in the clouds gathering, dissipating, and reforming. In the gentle rain and light breezes. It is also in the storms. At every moment, life offers something for those willing to meet it.
The beauty of life, I realised, doesn’t open itself to force. It opens to presence.
So this year, I decided to do something counterintuitive. I decided to stop telling life what I want and start asking life what it wants of me.
That question feels both humbling and destabilising, which is perhaps the precise combination I need right now. It requires me to relinquish the fantasy that I’m steering this whole thing alone. It invites a different posture entirely. One of collaboration rather than conquest.
As I reflected on the year just lived, I found myself circling back to a truth I’ve been slow to fully embody: the richness of life is found in encountering it exactly as it is. Not just the beauty of life but, as Reiner Marie Rilke writes, the terror too. The full, unedited spectrum of human experience. Rilke’s poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing reminds us we’re meant to experience all of life and every emotion fully. He writes, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
So I’m calling this year, “My Year of Radical Reality.”
Instead of planning and pushing harder, I’m aligning myself with the living intelligence around me. And instead of fighting what shows up and imposing my agenda, I’m practicing a quieter, braver response: I’m saying yes to what arrives.
Yes to each encounter, moment by moment.
Yes to love and joy.
Yes to fear and uncertainty.
Yes to discomfort, disappointment, frustration, and even conflict.
Yes to the understanding that everything holds something for me if I’m willing to decide how I relate to it.
I’m examining emotional pain differently too. Not as a problem to eliminate, but as a signal of my own resistance. Because by arguing with reality, I’m not partnering with it.
The new question I’m allowing myself to live into now is this:
How can I use the truth of what is (my current reality) to move into right relationship with life itself?
No rush, no forcing, just radical presence with open curiosity, and a willingness to listen to what life has to say.
As it turns out, life has been speaking all along. It has a lot to say.
What new question will you allow yourself to live into this year?
Leave a comment below.