With my year of involuntary retrospection and introspection hopefully behind me, I begin looking forward to 2025 and what I want to work through next year. It just so happened around the time I began working through my EOY Personal Review that a friend posted about her “Yearly Themes” project, which (me being me) I immediately jumped on. A group chat designed specifically for self-improvement? Sign me the fuck up.
Trying to surmise 2024 in a word has been difficult, but Sanchin is pretty damn close. Sanchin is a Karate kata (form) I study designed for shime testing where your focus and discipline are pushed to their limits. This year I’ve been poked and prodded as I progressed, my stances collapsed, my strikes held back, but I made it through. Sanchin roughly translates as “The Three Battles”: the battle of the mind, body, and spirit. For me, those were tested, honed, and improved at any cost.
So keeping on that karate analogy, where should I go from here? Sanchin is the Gō- in Gōjū-ryū, the hard in the hard-soft fighting system, but (like any good practitioner) I need balance. The -jū has been ignored - I need some soft in my life.
This year will be “The Year of Relaxation” - Sanchin is not a kata that can be performed continuously. A year I take a step back, let myself rest and switch off, find time for myself and those I care about, and care a little less about what other people think.
What this will include:
- Specifically giving myself space to do nothing, no project work or background thoughts, brain off time.
- Consciously choosing who I want to see and who I want in my life, keeping the people around I enjoy and letting myself hang out with them with no purpose. (And making sure I keep people around who aren’t involved in work/Karate so I’m not constantly talking shop.)
- Judging myself less, and letting other’s opinions affect me less (within reason.) This one’s a lot easier said than done, but I’ve got a good counsellor.
Beyond a couple small, actionable things (moving my desk out of my room, segregating work/school messages from personal, reducing screen-time before bed, etc.) I don’t have specific tasks to achieve here. But I think that’s a good thing. This is very much a qualitative project as when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become an accurate measure. My counsellor has called them “vectors” in the past, not something that can be reached but a guiding point to direct life towards.
With apologies to the data scientists & academics reading this for my uneducated and probably inaccurate use of science-y words to make myself sound like I know what I’m talking about.
I know I’m not going to be able to do this perfectly - the second that a certain someone decides it’s time to go to work I’m at battle stations for 6-8wks - but to be ready for that I need to build good habits to help me slow down. This pace I’ve been running at for the past couple years has helped me get where I am now, but it’s not sustainable.
Thank-you for coming to my TED Talk with a lot of unnecessary detail that’s unrelated to yearly themes. I don’t have a special interest, what’re you talking about? (/s)
Lots of love,
Hare xx