Every December I create ‘My 3 Wishes’ for the following year. This ritual is my chance to reflect on the year ending: its quintessential flavour, its high and also its low moments. And then, as the New Year approaches, I turn my head, Janus-like, and create my 3 Wishes for the year to come. I write these 3 Wishes in my journal and these become my personal vision, guiding my choices and actions for that year.
The following December I review these, what worked, what didn’t…and why… and then, once again, I create the next year’s vision with my 3 Wishes and subsequent actions to secure them.
I began this tradition 25 years ago and over the years, as I moved into the rhythm of this ritual, my wishes grew into an incremental visioning and evolved into ultimately finding my purpose, as well as continuing to take me on the most unexpected and magical adventures.
This is the framework for creating ‘My 3 Wishes for 2025’:
1. Write a review of 2024 including your personal as well as your professional life:
a) What were your high moments and what were your low ones?
b) What was the overall flavour/tone of 2024?
c) What are you most proud of about how you responded to this year?
d) Any regrets?
2. Now look to 2025:
a) What’s the overall flavour/tone, i.e. the ‘overarching wish’ you really want for 2025? Write a word/phrase.
b) Find/create a visual to capture this.
c) Now create your 3 Wishes for 2025 and the actions that will best ensure they happen.
If you create wishes that are too easy, then you will probably secure them, but you might be settling for just good enough. If you are aiming for something that really matters to you, then be bold and hungry: feeling shy about your wishes is the best indicator that you are on the right track! And these wishes are not exclusively focused on material outcomes. They include physical, emotional and psychological well-being, flowing from that fundamental question: ‘What will make your heart sing?’
Last December, my overarching wish for 2024 was a year rich with 'joyous love, magical sparkle and huge fun.’ So, as we near the end of 2024, how has this year been? Did my overarching wish manifest?
As I look back over 2024, there has been darkness and sorrow for many in the world and also for me, including family illness and endings and all the complex family dynamics such times inevitably bring. I remember reaching June and thinking: ‘Well this year hasn’t been rich with joy, sparkle and fun and we’re already halfway through!’
There are times in our lives when we are pitched into darkness: when we experience great loss and sadness and it would be inauthentic and wrong to deny these times with a ‘cheerleader, forced positivity.’ And not all darkness is bad. There is a fecund darkness, rich with potential for great growth and healing called the ‘futile void’. It can be a very scary place, particularly for those who like to control. It is the unknown with no certainty or guarantee of outcome and it is why many keep pulling back in panic, spinning in the ‘busy fool syndrome’, filling their life with noise and ineffective action, anything not to stay in their stillness and face the void.
And yet, ironically, this is not a de-void place. It is deep and full. It is the container of feelings, including deep buried feelings of hurt and loss. And beneath that something far richer. For if we allow ourselves to feel the fullness of this space, we are then able to move forwards into one of my favourite places: the ‘fertile void’. This is where true creativity and rich experiencing happens. It is the field that, having been allowed to stay fallow in the ‘futile void’, has now replenished its nutrients and is ready for growth. This is the place of hope and rebirth where we can make good, authentic choices and decisions. We still need to be patient in the fertile void, but it is not a passive waiting. It is an active one, building our strength and fitness on all levels: mind, body, heart and soul, preparing us for the perfect timing of right action…and then we leap!
Bad darkness has a very different energy. It is tight and rigid, it strangleholds growth and it is always the container for the abuse of power: the abusers holding sway through control and secrets. Everything in the dark behind closed doors. We are living in an extraordinary and liberating time when, over and over again, abusers are being exposed into the light. In France, Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men have been convicted of aggravated rape or sexual assault on the former wife of Pelicot over a period of 9 years. Gisèle Pelicot had the right to anonymity and the right to a trial behind closed doors, but she insisted on a public trial to raise awareness and encourage other victims of sexual crimes to speak out. Of the men accused of raping her, Gisèle said: ‘The shame is theirs. I'm lucky to have the evidence. I have the proof, which is very rare. So, I have to stand for all the victims…I say it's not bravery; it's the will and determination to change society.’
Extra-ordinary light in terrible darkness.
Yesterday evening I attended a Memorial Service for a much-loved former teacher of my son’s. It was a concert performed by Chris’s family and students and 18 months after the funeral when the grief would have been too raw for them to perform. It was a beautiful and deeply poignant evening rich with tears, laughter and joy. In the midst of death, we have a primal yearning for life, a hunt for that glimmer of hope and light.
And that’s the point. It’s about choosing light in the midst of great darkness and unhooking from the drama and unhealthy darkness of other people. This is what was destabilising me in the first 6 months of this year. I had stopped listening to my inner voice and truth and it was only when I realised it wasn’t my reality, but the reality of others hooked into their own drama and chaos, that I could regain my equilibrium.
The louder, more frenetic the energy of someone, the more you know they are panicking and running fast to avoid the inevitability of the ‘futile/fertile void’. Another indicator is when someone, Mr. Spock like, is over logical, what is psychologically called ‘Intellectualisation’, a defence mechanism when someone stays stuck in their head, reasoning and explaining away a situation to avoid uncomfortable or distressing emotions. The void is inevitable because we can run fast but we are simply running from ourself and we will then be forced to stop and face ourself in a much more brutal way, through physical and/or psychological illness.
Once I had made my choice to unhook, I started to see clearly and my perspective shifted. The light was already there but I hadn’t seen/felt it because I was too entrenched in the negativity of others. It wasn’t that external circumstances had fundamentally changed, but more that I had changed how I was seeing my world. And only then could I begin to let the light in.
From Midsummer onwards, I began to experience great joy with lots of love, sparkle and fun. And this helped balance and nourish me through any ongoing challenges. Life will always bring darkness as well as light…it’s the paradoxical richness of being alive…but true wisdom is learning how to respond to these challenges: ‘Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.’ Victor Frankl
My second learning of 2024 was experiencing how much I have changed since my last time of great darkness. In January 2021, I wrote an article about my 3 Wishes for 2021 and my learning through the first year of the pandemic in 2020:
‘When the first lockdown came in March, my world turned upside down. I was hit on all levels and found myself in solitary isolation and in a very dark wood. Everything was cancelled, personally and professionally, with no sense of when or if the lockdown would end. It was brutal and I reached a very low point. I am a very tactile, social human animal and before lockdown, like many in the big Metropolises, I had built a rich tapestry of a life: it brought in my emotional and psychological well-being, my happiness, and also my livelihood. Zoom dinners and quizzes felt cruel hoaxes and my heart just couldn’t do it.
And yet. Out of this darkness came immense light. At my lowest point, I was forced to own and show my vulnerability and my need for others in a way I have never really done before. My identity had always been to be there for and to heal others. It took the extremity of isolation in lockdown for this proudly independent woman to understand the shadow consequences of a passionately fought for freedom.
So why have I made the rich paradox of freedom and deep connection my overarching wish for 2021? It is because I…we… need both. Some people get to that point of lonely independence I have described. Others give up on themselves and become co-dependant, submerged into the other. Either state is living a half-life, the polarities of isolated freedom and superficial connection. I’m wanting the evolved paradox of both: the freedom to express ‘be’ ourself and the deep passionate connection with another. Ironically, we cannot truly have one without the other and I’m realising it takes experiencing the extremes of each state to shift into this balancing, co-creative paradox.’ https://www.cascad.co.uk/post/the-rich-paradox-of-deep-connection-and-freedom
Over the last 4 years, life has continued to encourage/force! me to grow and as I reflect on 2024, I have experienced the difference in myself from the woman I was at the start of 2020. I have learned not to hide in myself when challenging events happen but to show and share my vulnerability and feelings with my inner circle, my community of kindred spirits, where there is so much joyous love, magical sparkle and huge fun.
I’m writing this on the Winter Solstice, the darkest night for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and the time of year when we seek and celebrate light in the darkness. Whatever your culture and beliefs, I wish you a very merry festive season and may 2025 bring you great health, great wealth…in all its happy forms…and great love!
Hannah Elizabeth Greenwood
*The Image at the top was created with the assistance of ChatGPT 4o
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