1/4/23

 

Hello Friends, If you're reading these words you’ve arrived at the threshold of another year. You may be doing so in a swift, blissful sprint across the dateline or laboriously dragging your bruised and battered self through the last agonizing seconds of the past twelve months. Whether you greet today with elation or despair, you’re here now and the question is: What are you going to do with this next trip around the sun? I may not know you but I know a few things about you: Right now your mind is likely in some manner of reset mode as you ponder all the things you’d like to change along with the calendar. You’re probably carefully mulling over a laundry list of personal alterations, career endeavors, and daily practices you aspire to incorporate into this newborn moment in history. Today you’re making plans and declaring intentions and diligently power-washing the slate clean of thick layers of painful regrets, poor decisions, and missed opportunities. You’re finding a rising hope in the road ahead and in the possibility of restoration it holds for you. Yet I also know that, sadly, despite the great virtue of your intentions—unless you’re very careful, this year you could end up wasting much of the time you’re given Some of this will happen as a result of poor planning and busyness and the invariable interruptions of life. It will happen with rather frivolous pursuits: daily extended trips down social media rabbit holes, unplanned overnight binge watching excursions, marathon commute gridlock sessions, and an endless number of runs to the store for that one recipe item you’ve forgotten—again. You’ll also waste time in weightier, yet still largely fruitless matters too: replaying past mistakes you’re powerless to alter or dreading coming personal calamity that may never materialize; paralyzed with worry and weighed down with fear. Yet, more than how you handle life’s occupational hazards of time management and head navigation, I feel burdened to caution you against one single, brutally wasteful endeavor this coming year. I want to help you stop pretending. So many of us fritter away our days wrongly believing we need to edit ourselves; that to be truly accepted or loved or welcomed we can’t be our truest true and so we all learn to be something less. We each grow accustomed to concealing the parts of us we believe others can’t face or won’t tolerate, and as a result most of us feel as perpetual imposters; like we aren’t ever fully known by anyone. We become masters at this masquerade; necessary experts at deception and slight-of-hand, unaware that in doing so we conspire in our own alienation from the world. To some degree we all live in hiding. Friends, you and I can’t afford to waste any more daylight this way. We can’t squander another fleeting moment being anything less than the most honest version of ourselves we can muster. I’m inviting you into a year of unpretending; into a courageous season where you discard the masks and the pretense and the elaborate facades you’ve spent so much time erecting in an effort to receive what you already deserve. The things you believe, the stuff that matters to you, the cries of your heart, the stuff that terrifies you, the burdens you feel, the people you love, and the struggles you face—they’re all okay to share. Some really beautiful things happen when you’re as real as you can be: You find you’re no less of a mess than anyone else. You stop worrying you’ll be found out or exposed. You feel the lightness that comes with being fully known. You worry less about pleasing people with an edited version of yourself. You discover the peace that comes when you can say everything. You stop apologizing for things that do not require it. You find out that there’s really nothing to fear. Yes, friends, this year does indeed hold all the promise and the possibility you’d like to believe it does but it also holds the ever-present temptation to be something less than the most authentic version of yourself as you walk into it all. Refuse to do that. May you find freedom in these new days. May this open calendar make you brave. May this be the year of your unpretending. Be encouraged. John