9 Questions to Reflect on the Year
These will get you thinking deeply.
Around New Year’s, a writer named Courtney Martin, with a Substack called The Examined Family, offers a list of questions for end-of-year reflection. They’re not your typical “What was the highlight of 2024?” kind of questions, which I find boring, but the sort of questions that make you pause, feel a flutter of excitement and nervousness at the prospect of answering, and then give you something to think about long after you’ve responded.
They change from year to year, but I would like to share some of my favourites with you, gleaned from Martin’s lists of the last three years. Many readers may enjoy contemplating these questions as much as I do.
What did you pay a lot of attention to this year?
What is something that has grown “normal” to you that you would like to see with new eyes in 2025?
What was one of the best conversations you had this year? What made it so memorable?
Where did you feel stuck? Where do you crave an adventure, whether literally or metaphorically?
What was a thing you had a hard time admitting to yourself this year?
What would you prioritize next year if you stopped having an “after-life mentality,” as Oliver Burkeman puts it (i.e. that you are living for some future reward moment)
What did you shed, let go of, or give up this year? How did you get lighter?
Whose relationship to time do you admire most? How can you apply their mentality to your own life in the coming year? (I can answer that already! Read The Tale of Tara’s Cookies.)
What are you grieving? How could you carry that grief more collectively?
Sometimes we avoid facing big questions like these because they’re uncomfortable; they might awaken feelings of regret for things undone and unsaid in the past. But grappling with them is how we move forward and start to do things differently. Without acknowledging where we have chosen poorly or gone wrong, how else do we expect to change—and improve?
Asking these big-picture questions about how we live our lives is relevant to setting new boundaries with digital media in the home, too. We need to ask ourselves what kind of household and family dynamic we aspire to and then work backward from there. Though this can feel daunting, it’s more conducive to success when you know where you’re headed, at least roughly, and you can align your actions with your goals.
One thing I want more of in the coming year is silence—time and space to think. I have realized that it’s nearly impossible to have original creative thoughts without “soak time,” as I’ve heard it described, but it’s exceedingly tough to find that in a household with three energetic kids. I need to pursue it actively, whether through early mornings in a still-sleeping household or long walks like that ones Kierkegaard swore by, that have “walked [him] into [his] best thoughts.”
In the meantime, enjoy this last little bit of calm before the storm, this lull in time that Helena Fitzgerald called “Dead Week.” She described it in the Atlantic as the week between Christmas and New Year’s, “a time when nothing counts and when nothing is quite real.” Use it to think about how 2024 went and what you’d like 2025 to be. You’ll be caught up in the frenzy again before you know it.
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Love the questions, but also the powerful reminder to walk. Been needing to do that more recently
One of the best conversations I had this year was with my sister...it wasn't long, but from the heart. Love the questions!