Annual Themes

For a number of years now, I’ve set themes for the year: qualities I want to cultivate or manifest throughout the year. The inspiration for this came from a previous therapist, who specialized in parts work, who recommended a book by Danielle LaPorte, The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul. I just found my original workbook of exercises from that book. It looks like my first set of “Core Desired Feelings” to aspire to back in 2017 were Liberation, Transforming, Sparkling & Joyous.

I know I’ve written them down each year in various places, but haven’t found the rest of them easily. I generally choose 3 nouns, with the occasional adjective thrown in. 2025’s themes (for my first year of retirement) were Freedom, Balance, and Openness. They turned out to be extremely appropriate and helped me focus on gratitude for my open schedule and the freedom to choose what I wanted to do when, and on balancing my time and attention between different areas and goals, and between effort and tasks vs. relaxation and fun.

This year’s themes are Connection, Expression, and Patient Progress. As I wrote in my daily journal regarding the third theme in the list, Progress by itself felt too pushy, but Patience alone felt too laid back. So even though Balance was one of last year’s themes, it’s still a quality I aspire to, and I like the combination of those two traits or virtues.

After working remotely for those final four and three-quarters years before retiring, then losing my furbaby housemate in November, isolation is something I know I need to guard against. So reaching out to people regularly and making an effort to get to know people in my community center classes is important. I really miss Spark People, the free fitness site and social platform that was a big part of my life for years and kept me connected to people around the country and in other parts of the world. I’m thinking this may be the year I give Facebook a try, but would want to limit my online time.

I have biweekly Zoom meetings with my beloved 6-Pack group—6 women friends including me and my sister Mary, plus Meg—whom Mary met in college, Kathy—whom I met in high school, Pat—Mary’s best friend in junior high, and Susan—who lived just down the street and was in my 4th grade class. We’re talking friendships of 50 to over 60 years here. We’ve tried to meet up every year for a long weekend for more than 30 years now, only missing 3 times. We began Zooming as we tried to figure out if it was safe to gather during the first year of the pandemic. We realized it wasn’t but we enjoyed talking to each other, and thought why not do this regularly? Now we don’t need to spend hours when we do meet up trying to get caught up on everyone’s life for the previous year.

As far as Expression goes, writing regularly is a new habit I began at the start of the year when I wrote my second blog after a hiatus of more than four years. I haven’t managed to keep up with it every day. When I went several days without working on this blog, I journaled about my sadness over being inconsistent with this theme. “I’m disappointed that I haven’t been carving even a little regular time to get words I want to put out into the world. These ideas and feelings I have inside—that can someday, in some way, bless the world by adding to positive healing energy—need to come out. I feel strongly this is something I’m meant to do, and I want to build a daily habit of putting if not pen to paper, then fingers to keyboard to get these thoughts out of my head and give them material form.”

I recently realized that I haven’t been giving myself full credit for the writing I do—not just my more recent blogging efforts, but emails to friends, catching up on Discord, processing exercises for therapy. And I just now—with that last paragraph—as I copied from my daily journal, realized I’ve been writing every day for years as I journal every single morning. I began when I was frustrated with working for the state, aiming for 30 minutes, which since retiring is often 45 minutes to more than an hour. Sometimes I laugh as I read selections to my current therapist—some of my parts are pretty entertaining—and at other times I choke up when sharing some of my more profound or poignant thoughts.

And finally, on my theme of Patient Progress: the primary focus of that has been on my purge project that I began during my first year of retirement. Actually I refer to it as my P3 for Purge Project Plus, since sometimes more urgent needs—keeping up with financial tasks, insurance or health care issues—can become more urgent and require time and attention rather than sorting through old clutter and belongings. Although this year, I’ve opened up a new focus in therapy of dealing with a lot of emotional clutter, if you will, of old unconscious attitudes I picked up about myself, men in general or potential partners, and relationships that I want to challenge and change in order to be more likely to manifest an intimate romantic relationship, which I have long wished for, but haven’t overcome those mental blocks established so long ago.

I shared with my therapist that it’s taking me a lot longer than I thought it would to clear out the clutter, but she reminded me this isn’t just the accumulation of a year’s worth of stuff. In the past week, I was delving into one of the boxes that moved with me up from California to Washington in March of 2006—about 5 weeks shy of 20 years ago! And with devoting regular time to 3 weekly fitness classes, other YouTube workouts, daily double sets of occupational therapy and physical therapy exercises, often 30 minutes or more of meal preparation (chopping all those veggies for salads or cooking) twice a day—not to mention those Connection and Expression activities, as well as relaxing with reading for Balance—not a lot of time is left over for the purging. But by not pushing myself too hard or too fast, I’m staying motivated, and slowing down to fully take in my pleasure as the landscape of my environment changes and improves, and congratulate myself that my efforts are bringing me positive results.

All in all, this year’s annual themes feel really relevant and supportive to me living my best life. I’m even playing with possibilities for next year’s group. Stay tuned!