What Did You Learn This Year?
And how will you carry it with you?
Every year during Christmastime, I ask my family to go around the dinner table and share what they’ve learned this year. Now, a week before the end-of-the-year holidays, I’ll ask the same of you, my dear readers: What did this year teach you?
Try to dig a little deeper than the surface-level lessons, though those are worthy of noting, too. Take the time to contemplate what happened for you over the last 12 months, through the lens of growth. What did you withstand? What challenges did you go through or rise above? What did you learn about yourself, your life path, or what you want? What did you discover about the life that continues to unfold?
What did this year teach you?
Reflecting upon questions such as those above helps bring their answers into our awareness. With that awareness comes agency: you can do something (or not do something) with what you now are aware of. By cognitively engaging with the lessons we have learned, we increase the likelihood that we will remember what we’ve learned in the future.
Here are some of my answers, if you’ll allow me to share. What a year it has been.
Non-attachment
Thematically, my year was characterized by a lot of new beginnings and endings—and isn’t that always the case? 2024 brought weddings and births as well as death and loss, and I therefore cannot condense the year into an adjective like ‘great’ or ‘horrible’. 2024 was not a good or a bad year; it was, however, a year full of life. And life, as we surely must know by now, is always going to be all of it: beautiful, terrible, exciting, mundane. We know that the highs include the lows; that light exists because there is darkness; that love comes with loss.
We disrespect life by expecting it to always be easy or enjoyable; similarly, by anticipating that it will or should always be hard.
2024 paired highs and lows together in ways that made it impossible for me to ignore that they’re a package deal. The highs come with the lows; the lows come with the highs. The way through, as I always seem to be learning, is to not attach myself to either the high or the low. Instead, my focus is best placed on my experience of here, now.
Presence
I spent a lot of time this year thinking about the concept of free will, and whether or not we even really have it, and what control (if any) we do have over these lives we have been gifted with. Anyone else?
Here is the current conclusion that 2024 has led me to (and, of course, the accumulation of what every single moment that has occurred before this one, right now, has led me to): even if we have a lot less control and free will than we’d like to think, we do have the choice in every moment to accept the moment, which reduces the friction we cause by resisting it. Here now, right now, is always available to accept. It’s not a matter of thinking your way to acceptance, but one of shifting your awareness directly onto this moment, and allowing yourself to accept what is here, exactly as things are.
When I can both remember and do this (which frankly, is quite difficult), I can access a steady, strong sense of presence within me. That steady presence is a state I wish to continue to practice connecting to next year and throughout my life—an ongoing lesson, no doubt.
My thoughts on this topic are largely influenced by Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, the work of
and other teachers of Buddhist philosophical concepts, and my own experiences working with their ideas.Gray Area
Ok, let me move slightly away from the vague and continuous lessons like non-attachment and presence that hopefully don’t have you rolling your eyes, and into what I feel is the most important thing I’ve come to really understand this year: that I want to live, more and more, in The Gray Area. You know, the area that is not entirely defined and exists somewhere between extremes?
(How’s that for a little less vague?)
Let me explain.
It’s so tempting to want to categorize everything as good or bad, right or wrong—and certainly, there are things that do fall firmly into such categories. It’s so human, really: concrete, black and white thinking is a primary characteristic of young children’s brain development. With age and maturity, we gain the capacity to hold nuance and complexity. Still, how many adults seem to forget this capacity.
I don’t want the good/bad/right/wrong categorization impulse to be a default lens for how I view the world. I want to view people as complex, nuanced beings who rarely fall firmly into one single category. If I truly value complexity and nuance in my own life and thinking, then I have to allow the same to be true for those around me.
At the end of this year—an ideologically charged year, at that—I am staking a claim in that good, gray nuanced middle ground. Of course, I have plenty of ideological opinions that lean one way or another, but those opinions are always liable to change based on how my values and morals—which, for the most part, don’t change—interpret the information and resources available to me. In other words: I’m willing to change my mind based on what feels most right, compassionate, fair, and honest. I’m not going to live in a box that instructs me what and how to think, and I’m not going to be the one to place anyone else in a box, either.
So, as tempting and egotistically satisfying it may be to attach myself to a starkly defined spot, it’s not true. The world I live in is all gray area. Moving forward, I intend to maintain this attitude and offer the grace of the gray to others, too.
Cheers, 2024, to that gray middle ground. May 2025 be full of nuance.
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I hope my reflections have left you with something to chew on—I hope, too, that you take time in the next couple of weeks to reflect on what this last year has taught you. In the spirit of Actual Honesty, share your answers with someone else—broach the possibility of connection, why don’t you.
What have you learned this year, and how will you carry it with you?
Maggie