Here's my 2025 New Year Intention:
Reflect
Connect
Move
Create
Rest
I believe this is the first year I'm not titling this annual post with the word 'Intentions' (ie, multiple instead of singular). As it turns out, my propensity to think A LOT usually yields A LOT of material that can help me, but A LOT can be hard to keep track of (like so many personal tendencies, this one's a double-edged sword, baby). In the case of New Year Intentions, by the end of this year, I was not able to recall all my Beliefs, Values and Manifestation words (the EKLOS), let alone my New Year Intention/s words, without going back to look at my writing. While all of the ideas I landed upon could be helpful, HOW helpful they could be - in the immediacy of the fieldwork of life - feels limited if I could not even recall them all on my own. It is in the spirit of simplicity and ease that I declare just one concept - Adaptable - my New Year Intention for 2025. I'm feeling excited to have ONE big concept to ask myself to keep in my mind and my heart: it feels accomplishable to ask myself to remember this concept each day.
As I tend to do, I have put perhaps too much thought into the tense of the way I chose to express this concept through a word. 'Adapt' feels to forceful. 'Adaptation' feels permanent/ singular. 'Adapting' felt confusing when not applied to a specific example. I thought about writing it as 'Cultivating More Adaptability,' but that made it feel like an assignment I have to do long-term, as opposed to a nodding at a tool I'm already familiar with and just need to use. Perhaps this is another case of words not quite being able to capture the exact essence of what I'm meaning to express. This is not a jab at you, words. I do love you. This train of thought just makes me giggle, further reenforcing why I've ended up choosing a more abstract medium - movement - as my preferred mode of expression :)
But if word/s, WHY THIS word/ concept for my 2025 New Year Intention? To be Adaptable means one is "willing to change." While that meaning can be interpreted as pretty broad, for me in this time of life, it feels pretty specific: to be willing to adapt my expectation of how something will go to reflect what is actually happening, as well as to allow more flexibility into how I expect something to go in the first place. Examples: When I'll fall asleep. What time I/ we will leave for something. What time we'll arrive. How a lesson plan might be received by students. How much I will get done in a day. What I will get done in a day.
While I believe I've subconsciously understood for quite awhile, it consciously came to my attention this year - thanks to experiencing chicken-or-egg anxiety and insomnia that necessitated therapy for the first time in my life - how rigid, ie NOT ADAPTABLE, I am with my routines and expectations. Understanding this better has created a bit of a catch-22 for me, considering how I see myself artistically (which is a big part of how I see myself in general), given how much emphasis I put on improvisation. But even with this example, I usually impose a lot of specific parameters! While this tendency helps me juggle a lot of balls and get a lot done, it also feeds a lot of my worries and anxieties. The more I unpack all of this, the more I'm learning to truly believe that I can keep a lot of worries and anxieties from forming in the first place by consciously and regularly practicing being Adaptable.
A 'New Year Intention' like this can be gentle in its generality, and also tricky in its lack of specific steps for making happen. But here's the thing: I KNOW HOW to be Adaptable: I adapt on the fly as an educator all the time. I'm a pretty kick-ass movement improvisor. I'm getting pretty good at being responsive to the moment in parenting a toddler. I have proven time and time again that I am CAPABLE of adapting. It is a tool to which I already have access. With this Intention, I'm asking myself to access it more often, in more scenarios. Like when I'll fall asleep. And when I'm determining what time I/ we will leave for something. And when I'm figuring out what I think I will get done in a day.
I arrived to this concept by going through the New Year Intention-setting process I've developed over the course of many years (grounding writing in my journal, revisiting last year's NYIs, thinking through big happenings from the year, and re-reading my personal writing for emergent themes to determine Intention/s). To differing degrees and as I suspected from the beginning of the process, the themes that emerged can all relate back to being Adaptable. The concept of being Adaptable has been on MANY of my previous NYI lists, so its certainly not a new concept to me, but definitely one that feels apropos to the digesting 2024 and moving into 2025 with an easy to recall concept that will help ground my experience of life.
When revisiting last year's intentions - Kindness, Spaciousness and Levity - I came to feel that they can all be seen as facets of Adaptable. I see allowing myself to adapt as a kindness to myself that will spare me from unnecessary mental strife, a sense of spaciousness regarding how I can choose to react to things, and a measure of levity, in believing that I can navigate anything without taking it more seriously than it might need to be taken.
Thinking through my big happenings from the year also helped provide some context for why being Adaptable emerged as my New Year Intention for the coming year:
January:
St. Olaf J-Term
New Work Commission: Ballare Teatro
Decision to only by 5 new items of clothing in the year
February:
Mardi Gras
New Work Commission & Residency: Concerto Dance
March:
Cowles Center Closure
Last Cowles Residency
April:
Halifax Trip #1: Rooted Dance Project's PER Residency
IUD Removal
May:
Intensification of Insomnia
Onset or Major Career Worries
June:
Beginning Therapy for the First Time
Major Self-Doubts
July:
Starting (and Stopping - see below) an Anti-Anxiety Med
Confirmation of Second Pregnancy!
August:
New Work: Rhythmically Speaking 16th Annual Summer Show
Beginning Sleep Therapy
Booking a Lot of Unexpected Fall Work
September:
New Work Commission & Residency: University of Minnesota - Duluth
Major Sleep and Mental Health Improvement
October:
Taught at Texas Dance Improvisation Festival (+ Texas State Fair Trip #2!)
New Work Commission & Residency: Breck School
Making It Through My First Truly Awful Residency Experience
Family Trip to San Diego
New Work Commission & Residency: Winona State University
November:
New Rhythmically Speaking Production
Halifax Trip #2: My First Time Setting Rep Work on Another Company
December:
Niko's Golden (3rd) Birthday
While I do believe all the small moments matter just as much as the big happenings, it does help give me perspective to conjuring up a timeline of the big stuff. This one shows me a year that had a lot of trial and error in areas of focus that usually don't require a lot of my attention, like mental health. Going through experiences with insomnia, anxiety, therapy and medication this year is a big part of what led me to this desire to focus on being Adaptable.
When I moved on in my process to identifying emergent themes in my journalling from the past year, the following phrases stuck out to me as 1) impactful in general, and 2) also affirming of this overarching concept of being Adaptable:
While I could muse for many more characters on how I arrived to these standout phrases I hope to revisit here and there, I'll let them speak for themselves. While not all of them scream 'originality of thought,' what matters more to me is that I arrived to each of them not by reading internet self-help listicles or even therapy texts, but through the process of ringing my brain dry throughout the year by processing my own experiences in writing.
I've now handwritten on a piece of paper and taped up to my bathroom mirror the word 'Adaptable' to remind me every day of this intention. While I've never been one for leaving sticky notes all over the place (or even in one place!), it did feel good to take this ideation into the physical world with a little paper reminder. And with all that, I say:
Cheers to discovering how choosing to be Adaptable will better my experience of life :)
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