2020 has been a bitch to say the least. The amount of loss our world has suffered this year is hard to wrap my mind around and I know most of us cannot wait to jump into 2021. It is tempting to want to pack up this year in one of the many Amazon boxes laying around, shove it in a dark corner of the attic and never speak of it again. But wait, as appealing as that sounds, I encourage you to stop and take a moment to reflect on this past year before running away towards a shiny new year. As hard as this past year has been (and I know that so many have had it way harder than myself), there is a lot to gain from reviewing the highs and the lows of any year we are lucky enough to live through.

A tradition I began last December is to dedicate some time to writing down three lists:

• 2020 Gains
• 2020 Losses
• Looking Ahead to 2021

If you are like me and can hardly remember what you did last week, let alone an entire year, I have some tips on how you can jog your memory:

• Take a stroll through your camera roll.
• Check out your journal entries or even your daily planner if you use one.
• Ask your partner, kids or friends about their highs and lows of the year.
• Look at your social media.

Once you have written about your gains and losses from 2020, it is time to look ahead to 2021. Last year, I wrote a simple list of things I wanted to do more of (family karaoke in the living room, composting, have people over more… bahaha little did I know) and things I wanted to do less of (spend money on things I don’t need, let my frustrations out on the kids, etc) and then added a few resolutions. This year, I took a new approach. I wrote a list of things I hope to do like where I want to travel, what hobbies I want to pursue, how I plan to upgrade my health and my savings, etc in paragraph form. While I love the idea of making specific, measurable goals for New Year’s resolutions, it is also enriching to write casually about the changes you want to make. From these, you might choose to pick one to focus on for your New Year’s resolution.

After writing these three lists, I took things one step further and tried something I’ve never done before. I decided to visualize exactly what my life might look like this next year and wrote about it in the third person. I know it sounds a little hokey, but this practice was really empowering and enjoyable. I included smaller details about my daily life as well as bigger goals and ideas I hadn’t even thought to consider in the previous list. Writing in the third person is beneficial because in doing so, you are able to take a step back from yourself and write with some perspective. As I wrote, I could actually see myself living the life I want in the following year and it felt more within reach than ever before. I appeared confident in the choices I was making when I normally might feel skeptical when listing off my many goals. I encourage you to give it a go and see what comes of it.

It is so easy to just drift through life without stopping to recognize what we’ve been through. Writing out your gains from the past year forces you to appreciate all the good aspects of your life. Your values become clear when you go through this process year after year. Recognizing your losses is equally important. Acknowledging the losses helps you understand yourself better and once you come face to face with those harder times, it is easier to move on from them. It is amazing to see all that can happen in a single year and this process is a great way to hold on to those stray memories that might have gotten away from us if we hadn’t taken the time to collect them. So pick them out of your photos, journal entries, and facebook statuses, dust them off and line them up on your shelf so you can make sense of your year. So that you can look back and remember. So you can clear your thoughts and be intentional moving forward.