My Intentions for 2024

I learned a while ago that the notion of a singular, New Year’s resolution just doesn’t vibe with my personality, so I instead focus on a series of intentions I’d like to pursue in the new year. In 2024, I’m focusing on some intentions related to recent struggles I’ve had with anger.

I felt fortunate that, when Chelsea died, my initial emotional responses were grounded more in love, compassion, and gratitude than they were in anger. Of course I was mad about what happened, but anger didn’t saturate my moods in those early days, weeks, and months. I found out later that the anger was there, buried beneath the surface, but again, anger wasn’t the dominate emotion framing my experience.

Still, there were some specific triggers that activated my anger. The most significant such trigger was my perception of individuals who had talent, means, and resources, but who it seemed were actively trying to make the world a worse place to either enrich themselves or consolidate power/influence. In hindsight, the trigger makes a lot of sense: Chelsea was a brilliant, compassionate person who dedicated her career to teaching, learning, and empowering students (particularly women); why is she the one who dies young? It’s not fair that someone who was so good, who worked so hard at helping, has a life cut short by tragedy while others, with similar means and talents, waste that talent on endeavors that divide, enrage, and manipulate people.

Of course, for someone like me who is religiously agnostic, concepts like fairness don’t hold much purchase in the narrative of what happened. But the idea of fairness goes a long way in justifying my emotional responses, including the specific triggers that send me into a fit of rage.

And so…

I’ve been struggling with this anger trigger more than I would have liked in the last few months and I anticipate it will happen as much, if not more, in 2024. We live in a world with bad actors, and there are plenty of opportunities for those bad actors to thrive this year.

So then my intention this year is to try and not let anger get the better of me when I get triggered by exposure to such bad actors. My intention is to find compassion, understanding, and peace/calm in those moments, even if that means redirecting and/or avoiding thinking about those individuals (maybe phase 2 of this new intention is maintaining my calm while engaging with such individuals, but I’m not there yet). My intention is to do the hard work of being better which, again, is the best way I know how to honor Chelsea’s life.

And it is work. The easy thing to do when I am confronted with someone or something that angers me is to embrace that anger and start shouting for 5 minutes. Unfortunately, the ‘easier’ road tends to leave me worse off, tired, frustrated, feeling powerless. I also don’t like myself when I put anger in the driver’s seat, which is its own set of issues. So again, the intention is to try and do the work of finding compassion and understanding when confronted with an anger trigger.

Hard as it may be to do so, I know that this work has merit. I think I’ve done as well as I have in the last 3 years precisely because I try and find compassion and live a life of gratitude (with a lot of help from friends and loved ones of course). Love and compassion are incredibly powerful emotions and, properly channeled, can generate a tremendous amount of strength. So all I’m really trying to do with my new year’s intention is apply this practice of love/compassion, which is present in most phases of my life, a little more frequently and direct it towards everyone, including those whose life choices are very different than my own.

Kind of reminds me of this young guy from Nazareth who talked about loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you (my mother is an ordained Presbyterian minister and I sat through many Sundays in church as a child…while I’m not religious, I’d like to think that some of the key themes and ideas stuck).

We’ll see how I do with this year’s intention as the months progress. My sense is that this is going to be a complicated year…