A one-word resolution
Happy New Year! ‘Tis the season for resolutions, intentions and words of the year. This seasonal focus on change is always a little uncomfortable for me. Resolutions tend to make me feel hemmed in. Intentions, though hopeful and aspirational, often feel vapid when everyone around me seems to be doing something concrete. And, as a wordsmith, choosing a single word to hold as my mantra for an entire year has always felt nearly impossible. This year, however, I realized that a single word was my New Year’s resolution, my intention for 2026, and my word of the year. It is also the heart of the prayer I’ll be praying all year. The word is YES.
When I mentioned this is to my spiritual director, she said, “Oh! That’s dangerous.” Though we both laughed, I know she could be right. But I also know that, after five years of life events that I would have preferred to greet with a resounding NO, YES is exactly where I need to be. You see, I have learned, rather accidentally, during these most challenging, most painful, and most frightening years of my life that it is not the anxiety, illness, exhaustion or loss that are most debilitating. What sucks the life out of everything is my resistance to what is happening.
So, mostly because I have learned the hard way that NO cripples the soul, I am all in as I greet the new year with a resounding YES.
YES as a welcome
The best and most effortless YES is a welcoming stance to what is happening in your life. Just because this YES is the most effortless, does not mean that it happens without effort. Sure, it’s easy to welcome the winning scratch-off ticket you received in your Christmas stocking. It would be hard not to notice that. But we can miss many moments worthy of being consciously welcomed if we are not paying keen attention.
Have you opened a pomegranate yet this winter? It’s not the easiest fruit to prepare. And doing so often requires some thorough clean-up. But the beauty and deliciousness of those almost iridescent seeds that you find hiding in that drab little reddish ball make it all worthwhile! This is just one small way that YES to a more time- and labor-intensive treat can make an ordinary moment like a solitary lunch at home quite wonderful.
YES as acceptance
While we can welcome the challenges that we choose – training for a long hike or deciding to read a book a week this year – it would be ridiculous to suggest that we could or would welcome all of the unexpected challenges that life throws our way. In these moments, YES shifts from welcome to acceptance. For example, days when I have forty papers to grade in addition to a trip to the market before making dinner go better if I accept that it’s going to be a long day and get going without bemoaning the situation.
I’m not suggesting that we Pollyanna our way through days like this. That smacks of toxic positivity. Acceptance is quieter and more authentic. For me, it often involves taking a deep breath and then taking the first step, and the next step, and the next step. Rather than slapping a smile on my face and reminding myself over and over that I love my job, I get to work and, as I do, I gradually realize that no job is perfect and the one I have is pretty great despite the fact that it involves days like this.
YES as surrender
And then there are the life events that change everything. It is said that the three biggest life stressors are death, divorce and moving. To these, I would add illness (yours or that of someone you love), long-haul grief, the loss of a job, or a sudden and unexpected transition. In moments like these, at least for me, acceptance is not quite the right word. It feels too passive. Moments like these require surrender.
Do you remember earlier when I said that it is resistance rather than the big, bad thing itself that sucks the life out of everything? Surrender allows us to engage with what is going on when what is going on is decidedly, absolutely NOT OK. And engaging with what is going on is saying YES not to the big, bad thing but to living your one, precious life.
Surrender is almost always hard. Surrender can take many, many tries. Surrender most often occurs after we have exhausted every option and every resource and every ounce of energy. But let me lighten this with the fact that surrender is the kind of YES that life asks of us the least often. So it’s OK to need a little practice with it.
Surrender also takes faith and trust. Faith that it’s not over; that God is not done here yet. Trust in life. Trust because we can see in the rearview mirror that what feel like our worst moments often reveal themselves to be the beginnings of something completely new. Here, too, we need to be patient and gentle with ourselves. Faith and trust are not something we can grit our teeth and create. They come, quite by grace, from living through the hard stuff.
Happy New Year
Circling back to the possible danger of my intention to live 2026 from a place of YES – I feel pretty safe. After all, my resolution for 2026 is not to avoid big, bad things. It is to avoid some (much?) of my exhausting resistance that leads up to surrender. My hope is that lots of practice saying YES as a welcome, and YES as acceptance will make it easier for me to say YES as surrender should I need to do that. And that all of these YES-es will combine to make for a happy new year.
Patanjali teaches us to practice letting go (or vairagya) on and off our mats. On our mats, we are letting go of any notion of how our practice should go. Off our mat, we are letting go of any notion of how our life should go. He is guiding us to surrender or say YES to what is happening in our lives. Vairagya’s softer energy balances the effort (abhyasa) that could easily exhaust us on and off our yoga mats.