2024: The Grand Shift From Doing into Being
About 4,000 years ago, ancient Babolynians are thought to be the first to have new year’s resolutions, which actually occurred around the spring equinox when the first crops of barley were planted.
During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. They also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. These promises could be considered the forerunners of our New Year’s resolutions. If the Babylonians kept to their word, their (pagan) gods would bestow favor on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favor—a place no one wanted to be.
The rest of this article chronicles how the practice of new year's resolutions was further influenced by Janus, a Roman deity, revising the new year to start on January 1st, and early Christians marking this as a moment for reflecting on past mistakes with a resolve to do better in the upcoming year.
Today, new year’s resolutions are widely recognized as a secular practice, with many setting action-oriented personal goals to and for themselves, rather than gods. Thus, today, we have the new year tradition of promises made for much doing in the coming year.
Jessica Delmar, one of my spiritual teachers, just shared her message for 2024’s theme on Abundance:
“...we must surrender the idea that what we are seeking is something we are meant to have and begin embracing the idea that what we are seeking is something we are meant to be. This is a shift of Consciousness that we have all been integrating, the shift from doing or having into being and creating, and so this shift of Consciousness is also shifting the way that we manifest. I know a lot of people are having a hard time in this in-between space between the shift of doing and having into being and creating…particularly right now that in-between space is so sticky because the shift is such a grand shift.”
It's no surprise to me that this shift is grand and a sticky one at that, given the past 500 years of capitalism that functions on much producing, that functions on much doing.
Jenny Odell touches on the stickiness of this in-between space in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy:
“...I think that “doing nothing” - in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen - entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change. I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully…
...the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”
My take on Odell’s book on doing nothing is synonymous with being and moving at the speed of nature and our biology rather than the incessant doing at the speed of high-velocity disposable machinery.
I am leaning into flawfully being with the stickiness of this transition into the new year by living into the question:
Instead of externalizing my efforts into doing for abundance, how can I shift to internalizing my being-ness by embodying abundance?
Being is my 2024 intention.
Being abundance + generosity.
Being scarcity…then remembering…
Being gratitude.
Being dissociation to take reprieve from the discomfort of being human, then remembering…
Being presence + embodiment.
Being somberness + seriousness.
Being lightheartedness + play!
Being pettiness + judgement + intolerance, then remembering…
Being curiosity + grace + compassion.
Being security + confidence.
Being awkwardness + insecurity + fear and doing it anyway…being bravery + courage!
Being uncertainty + anxiety.
Being quiet, listening for my inner-guidance.
Being WOW! + wonder + awe, moved to tears by the sheer beauty of life.
Being despair + depression, wrecked by the searing pain of life.
Being alchemy; audacious hope + optimism.
Being heartbreak + isolation + loneliness.
Being invitation + belonging + love.
Being cuteness.
Being feistiness.
Being cuteness + feistiness, at the same time (about time I own this).
Being wilderness.
Being inner-child.
Being inner-elder.
Being wound + pain.
Being healing + pleasure.
Being shadow.
Being light.
Being altar + prayer + ritual + ceremony.
Being enough.
Being earth + water…
“I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”
―John O'Donohue
[being with the sunset on the Salish Sea at Alki beach]