On Leaving the Windows Open

I’ve felt a bit of an obligation to myself to write an end of year essay. Put a bit of a bow on 2024, reflect on this experimental time and things I’ve learned, et cetera et cetera. But truth be told, I’ve really struggled to summon the energy for articulate emotional housekeeping in the short final days of this year.

Earlier this holiday season, I sat next to a woman at a Christmas lunch who, when casually asked how she’d be spending her new year, launched into a thorough and mildly manic explanation of how she would be abstaining from revelrous celebrations and would instead spend it “mindmapping 2025.” 

She would, she explained, sketch, write and eventually visualize into permanence all the things she intended to accomplish in her next year of life, laying out in great detail how she would achieve such things and, presumably, manifest some form of elusive happiness for herself. 

She was beaming. It sounded like an exhausting way to spend an evening. 

Despite her thorough excitement at the task, I couldn’t help but marvel at how deeply achievement-oriented this outlook on contentment was. The hopeful belief that her future happiness could be manifested if only she could look back a year from now in triumph and say: Well done, you – you accomplished everything you had already planned to do. 

I set out last December with the intention of writing an essay a month. Now at the cusp of annual turnover, I’m reluctant to say I’ve managed a meager seven.

When I started writing again, it was the first time in many years I’d done so creatively – writing not for work or documentation, but simply for the purpose of putting pen to paper and seeing what came out. 

When you spend any energy writing, there’s loads of advice and adages people give you about how best to write. Routine, most will tell you, is critical. Write every day, according to just about everyone. Create deadlines, real or imaginary. Write even when you think you don’t have anything to write.  

However, I don’t like nor crave routine – in fact, I tend to rebel from it, even when self imposed. So you can imagine my surprise to realize my new creative writing habit was creating a totally new and organic working routine of its own, sprinkled amidst the busier days of this year and completely consistent for each of the seven essays I’ve managed:

• Contemplate seedling of an idea 

• Let it gnaw at me for weeks until it’s obvious it’s Something 

• Scribble occasional notes about Something

• Block time in calendar on three to five occasions to Sit Down and Write About Something

• Cancel on self three to five times due to Not Being In The Mood 

• Wake up one morning and unexpectedly write Something in one sitting 

• Edit for half a day 

• Publish 

Inconsequential as it may seem, it’s been one of the surprising pleasures of this year to witness a whole new creative habit develop in myself, one I can’t seem to modify all that much but is nonetheless producing results I’m decently happy with. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing these essays and it’s been such a similarly unexpected delight to get to reconnect with people I never would have thought would read these aimless observations of an unusual year in the Business of Life Design.

None of this, needless to say, was on the mindmap.

When I think back to last December, I was staring down the task of finally executing a new life configuration after several years of immense transition to get there. 

Did we achieve the things we thought we would this year? Comme ci, comme ça. 

Then what, pray tell, can we take away from this year?

Without a doubt, discovering how deeply important it turns out to be to identify, with great deliberateness, your personal collection of what I like to call New Constants – the critical components that make up the foundations of your days in each phase of life.

Inevitably, a list of New Constants evolves quite dramatically over time. It almost certainly has when you got too busy, too distracted by The Things You Thought Mattered, or maybe just stopped paying attention. But identifying these components, valuing them for their abject importance, and ensuring your access to them I have found to be the framework for momentary contentment.

They can take the shape of many big things, like sourcing an inspiring space to work from each day; seemingly insignificant things, like the pleasantly intimate conversations you have with the woman who waxes your eyebrows; they may simply be determining where you buy your lemons.

But they bring the sweet relief of feeling like a present cast member in your own life — and let you, however temporarily, disregard the list of theoretical life decisions and hypothetical versions of yourself that take you out of your actual life each day. 

Surprisingly, when you slow down long enough to settle into the comfort of these constants, something counter-intuitive, something glorious, starts to happen: you create enough time and space for the parts of life that you can’t predict, plan for, manifest, mindmap.

On numerous occasions this year, in moments of slowness I could feel the “what next” itch seeping through the air space of consistency, that itch to contemplate all the hypothetical versions of the life I could be leading. But at precisely these itchy moments, something pleasantly unexpected would drop out of the sky to totally shift the focus. It’s happened like clockwork, over and over again in this strange and unexpected year, a pattern so continuous it has at times felt cosmic.

In many ways, it is the culmination of themes I’ve wrestled with this year – on how to better manage one’s energy, revel in patience, swim in true friendship and find more comfort in life’s endless contrasts. The recognition that time well spent is so often measured by all the ways you never expected to spend it.

To choose to leave the windows open and see what flies in.

Things that helped shape these thoughts:

• The immeasurable Ina Garten’s living mantra, always banging on the walls of my brain: Be ready when the luck happens.

• This blissful conversation between Isabella Rossellini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus

• A history of risotto that only the New Yorker can provide

Happy holidays and thanks for reading this year x

Light Moves is a newsletter from PALTA Studio. It is personal reflections and conversations with others on the continuous process of refining the shape of life.