2026: The Year of Slowing Down.
I am tired in a way that makes me want to befriend emptiness rather than fill it.
I am tired.
A tiredness untouched by sleep. It rests deeper than my body, where ambition collides with the soul’s plea for stillness. This isn’t the fatigue of illness or overwork; those have remedies. This is the exhaustion of someone who has kept every promise, met every challenge, and now stands at the summit, finding the view less a victory than a long overdue permission to rest.
It is a “functional exhaustion.” I haven’t missed a deadline. I haven’t missed a day of writing. I haven’t let my friends down.
The world rewards momentum. It celebrates those who take on more, who say yes, who stack projects as trophies. Yet no one teaches when you’ve carried enough, when capability becomes a burden.
If you ask an adult to name the most stressful milestones of a lifetime, they’ll list them like a gauntlet:
Pivoting into a new industry.
Moving your life to a new place.
The vulnerability of getting married.
The risk of starting a new business.
I’ve crossed every finish line in the last six months. I didn’t stumble or take a “mental health day.” I performed. But momentum has a tax, paid in inner quiet. That debt is due.
I am tired in a way that makes me want to befriend emptiness rather than fill it.
We live in a culture that treats space as a problem, a gap to bridge, an opportunity wasted. We’re taught to optimize every hour, to turn hobbies into side hustles, to network through leisure.
Rest itself has been rebranded as “self-care”, something productive, something that serves our efficiency, but what I’m craving isn’t strategic rest. It’s not a recharge period before the next sprint. It’s a fundamental reorientation toward slowness, toward the possibility that not everything needs to be filled, that some voids are meant to be inhabited rather than conquered.
So for 2026, I’m choosing a different path. My theme is slowing down.
Most of my time will go to the four J’s: Jehovah, Joana, Job, and jotting down experiences. Missing from this list: endless expansion, new ventures, constant commitments. I’m not taking on more. I’m tending what already exists with attention that requires moving slowly enough to see.
I am reclaiming my time from the “projects” that demand my creative marrow and giving it back to the things that sustain my soul.
My life will be governed by the Four J’s:
Jehovah: There’s a difference between believing and dwelling, between knowing and abiding. The former can happen at speed; the latter requires you to linger.
Joana: the person who witnessed these six months of transformation and deserves more than my functional presence. Love at speed is logistics. Love at rest is intimacy.
Job: Doing my work with excellence, but letting it stay within its banks. There’s dignity in doing something well without needing it to be the launching pad for something bigger.
Jotting: Writing not for an audience or a brand, but to capture the experiences that matter.
What I’m describing might sound like retreat, like I’m pulling back from life. But I think it’s the opposite. I think I’ve been retreating into busyness, using achievement as a buffer against the vulnerability of simply being. It’s easier to point to what you’ve done than to sit with who you are when you’re not doing anything at all.
The tiredness I feel is my body’s wisdom finally breaking through the noise.
It’s saying: you’ve proven whatever you needed to prove. You’ve demonstrated resilience, capacity, and follow-through. Now what? Now, can you be generous enough with yourself to stop performing vitality and start inhabiting it?
Slowing down is not giving up. It’s the mature recognition that sustainability matters more than spectacle, that depth requires duration, and that some kinds of growth only happen in stillness. Remember that trees don’t rush their rings. Rivers don’t apologize for their meandering. Soil doesn’t hurry its richness.
I want more time with emptiness; I suspect that’s where I’ll find what all the achievement was for. Not the next thing or the bigger thing, but the enough-ness of what is already here.
So I will slow down. Not because I’ve failed, but because I’ve earned the right to stop racing. Not because I have nothing left, but because the best gift I can offer myself, those I love, and the work I care about, is my unhurried presence.
The world will keep spinning at its frantic pace. Projects will call out for attention. Opportunities will present themselves. I will practice saying: not now, not yet, perhaps not ever. In 2026, I will practice being tired without shame, empty without panic, and slow without apology.
If you write and I don’t answer, wait for a few weeks. Don’t worry about me. I am not broken, and I am not asking for a cure. I am simply full. To take on more would be to spill over.
This is my 2026: a year of slowing down, a year of sacred subtraction, of intentional whitespace, of learning to measure richness not by what I accumulate but by what I’m finally still enough to notice.
If you would like to create a theme for the year. Here is my template.