I’m popping in to say that I’ve been thinking a lot about my theme for 2024 — brainstorming on walks and on paper. What word excites me? What word feels full of possibility? What word keeps coming home to nest?
That word, it turns out, is “curiosity.” (Which is not spelled with a second “u” as I wrote in my journal this morning. Looked funny but I kept writing it that way, until I got CURIOUS and looked it up.)
I used a couple of pages in my journal this morning fleshing out what this means to me—how I’ll move through 2024 with curiosity as my North Star.
Here are those pages. I’ll just let them stand on their own.
Do you choose a yearly theme? What word do you feel in your bones? I’m curious. <insert winking emoji>
From the Pen Cup 
What is the paper there? What kind of book. Looking for a good one that is blank without lines and this one looks to close to what I am looking for
It’s the Nanami Seven Sea Crossfield. https://www.nanamipaper.com/products/seven-seas-crossfield-a5-grid-journal-6th-edition.html
Here’s a link to the blank “Standard” version: https://www.nanamipaper.com/products/copy-of-seven-seas-standard-a5-blank-journal.html
I always use one of the Seven Seas notebooks for my morning pages. I think I’ve filled up 15 or so. Love them!
Great thank you!
I love the list of questions you wrote. Curiosity is a prominent theme in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic” — especially how it relates to creativity. I highly recommend!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24453082-big-magic
I think I own that!! On the reading list!
Hi, Mary, what a good choice for your theme and word of the year. I didn’t bother with one this year, but I was thinking about 2024 a few weeks ago and experimenting with the sort of “new dawn” concept with words like “awaken” and “arise”. Then I realised that what I’m really going to need next year is “endurance” – it doesn’t feel like the coming year is going to be an easy one and I need to accept that rather than fight against it. I am 2 years away from getting my old age pension (probably not from retiring, but perhaps from being able to step back and work part-time) and I’m finding it a long slog. I enjoy my job, but the systems we use are creaky and need significant change which is unlikely to come about in the next two years. Since a large part of my job is about identifying areas which need improvement, it feels a little superfluous when there isn’t enough resource to bring about the improvements. I hope that working on my endurance will help me to bring more energy to the things I enjoy and can improve outside of the work environment.
My word for the year/theme is “intention”. I don’t want to be doing things just for the sake of doing them. I feel like there is a lot of chaff in my life that isn’t making me happy and I want to sift that out by being intentional in my activities.