New Years Will Be As Meaningful As You Want To Make It
If you want some practical steps on how to do this, I’d encourage you to start small
1. Get to a quiet place either at home or out in nature and be quiet and still for a while
2. Maybe put on an instrumental song with no lyrics that you enjoy.
3. Close your eyes
4. In that stillness, see if a word emerges from your mind that you want to embody in 2025.
I was able to do this moments before the clock hit 12:00 on January 1st and came up with the word: Belief.
In expanding my practice, Matt Bishop Therapy will simply no longer do. So after a few months of deliberating, I settled on the name: Sonder Therapy Group. If you want to read more about the name, you can click here.More important than the name, are the people. I hired each of them because they impressed me with one quality in particular: They walk the walk. Their work as therapists is an extension of who they are as individuals. They value introspection, self reflection, humility, and growth. They don’t consider themselves finished products and instead lead with vulnerability, having a therapeutic posture of walking alongside clients on their own journeys. I firmly believe this quality each of them possess is the soil from which all gifted clinicians grow their clinical skills. In saying all of this, it brings me back to my word for 2025: belief. I believe in these new clinicians. I believe in their abilities, their gifts, their intelligence, and their ethics. I believe they will be real game changers in the lives of their future clients. I believe they already are excellent clinicians, and I believe in their ability to hone their skills under my supervision.So if you want to bring a bit of intention into the new year. I’d encourage you to find a quiet place, let a word emerge, and keep that word with you as you navigate your days in the coming weeks and notice the times in your life when you’re being invited into embodying it. Happy New Years everyone.
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.”
Edges and High Places
He looked out over the water for along time before he answered. “It’s an edge,” he said at last. “It is a high place with a chance of falling. Things are more easily seen from edges. Danger rouses the sleeping mind. It makes some things clear. Seeing things is a part of being a namer.
Few would fault you if you couldn’t place the above quote. For as much as The KingKiller Chronicles has achieved a cult like following among those of us who love the fantasy genre of literature, its still a good deal away from piercing the barrier into pop culture. (Although Lin Manuel Maranda did nearly adapt the source material into a TV show a few years back, though it eventually fell apart before prouduction).
The passage of note features the hero of the story, Kvothe, receiving one last lesson from his enigmatic, eccentric, mischievous, and wise mentor figure Elodin, before he departs on his next adventure. Elodin invites him to sit next to him on the lip of a stone bridge and dangle his feet over a 100 foot drop to the river below. Sitting on the edge of the bridge, in that high place, Elodin gives Kvothe some parting words he, as with the rest of us, need to hear.
Edges and high places make things clear for us. In case you’re tempted to disregard this as merely an attempt at poetic musings written for nerdy fantasy readers. I’d like to draw your attention to this meta-analysis published in the Journal Frontiers in Public Health: Is altitude a determinant of the health benefits of nature exposure?
After reviewing 27 peer-reviewed published studies, the authors declare, “Overall, we found that altitude was significantly associated with alleviation of negative emotions and increase in physiological relaxation. Regarding negative emotions, anxiety, depression, confusion, and fatigue had a significant positive quadratic association with altitude, which implied that the alleviation of negative emotion concurrently increased” (Kim et al. 2022; p. 21).
So what is it about gazing into a vast landscape from a high place that is so helpful? In the book, Elodin calls the place they’re sitting an edge, and for us I think this word can be looked at both literally and metaphorically. When we take ourselves to the edge of a cliff, or a look out point, or in the case of the book: a bridge, we are also brought to the edge of safety, the edge of earth, the edge of the mundane. Our fear of the height is distinct from our anxieties that incapacitate our ability to think and decide, and it rouses our sleeping minds to wake up and to see our circumstances in proper perspective.
We as humans have been writing about this experience of being in high places for thousands of years. In the collection of Jewish literature known as the Nevi’im, the poet/prophet Habakkuk writes, “Make my feet like hinds feet, set me on high places.” Yet in modernity with all our comforts we risk losing this connection to edges, when the mind quiets as the wind hums past us. Danger whispers truths we ignore in comfort— and reminds us that we are capable of standing steady even at the brink.
So maybe there’s a high place with an edge waiting for you nearby. It could be a naturally occurring edge like a hillside, a pleateau, or a cliff. Or maybe like Elodin and Kvothe its something manmade like a bridge or a skyscraper. If you happen to find yourself in some form or fashion lost or confused and in need of clarity or perspective, consider taking yourself to an edge at a high place, above the fog of petty distractions. You might just find what you need to step back down into your life with steadier footing and a wider perspective.