A Mid-Year Check-In
How is your 2026 going?
Hello and welcome if you’re new around here! It’s been a quiet Substack summer for me (though not quiet elsewhere) but I’m glad to be back writing again. I have some discernment to do about where my writing will ‘live’ in the future: AI is really messing up a lot of things for writers and I hate the idea of my words being combed by a robot that builds a profile of me (or anyone!) With that said, I’m here for now, and very grateful for my words to have a spot in your inbox and time in your day.
Today is the first cool day in what feels like approximately one million years. (I could wear a sweatshirt outside and be comfortable, as opposed to melting – what joy!) I know not everyone struggles with the heat, but I am not made for it, nor is the country I live in. Today’s weather - cool, cloudy, breezy - is the stuff of England. It’s also the stuff of September and though we are still a ways off from it, I find myself filled with ‘back to school’ energy, wanting to get out the new notebooks and sharpened pencils and planning calendars.
I’ve also revisited some goals I set at the start of the year and was pleased to find that though they required significant adjustment along the way, I’ve managed to hang on to the original vision.
(I have a whole series on setting goals - ‘new year’s resolutions’ can be made anytime! Start here if you’re interested.)
So today, riding high on the cool breeze (sorry if you’re still in a heatwave and hating it), I thought I would share a few things that have been working for me, and some things that I hope will continue to work for the rest of the year. (Here’s what worked for me last year; there’s some overlap.)
I love getting to peek into other people’s discernment processes, because even if they have a very different life than my own, I can still learn from their methods. (If you enjoy glimpsing as well, you might enjoy my “Outside the Box” interview series.)
If you want the summary version of 2026 so far, it’s pretty simple :) I wrote things down on a single sheet of paper and assigned general weeks/ months by which I hoped to do them. I then checked back with that sheet of paper regularly - often adjusting the timeline as needed - so I knew what my focus was during any given week. Turns out that simplicity beats complexity!
Here’s the longer version of what worked:
1. Remembering that yes and no are two sides of the same coin
I really wanted to make progress on some writing projects this year - things I’ve been wanting to do for a while but never got around to really focusing on. Well, it turns out that if I have said yes to one project (even if it’s just for me and no one else sees it), I have already said no to other things, and I need to be faithful to that yes and those nos. Saying no creates the space to work on the yes; saying yes gives the motivation to say the no. (More on that here.)
2. Trying to hold the tension between flexibility/availability and discipline
It’s all well and fine to commit to a project, but people aren’t always as predictable as my calendar, and that means that sometimes I had to put the project down and be present to others. I got to put the project down and be present to others – just like I have people who will drop their projects for me: it’s a gift. A gift to give (one that care-givers experience on the regular!) and a gift to receive (one that many of us in our independent spirits would rather not.)
I am lucky enough to have ‘a room of my own’ to write in; I am lucky enough to have people calling me out of it. In any given moment I’m not always good at holding this tension but overall it’s one I try to embrace intentionally, and I find that the more I do, the more peace that comes with it.
3. Being faithful to doing what is mine to do
I’ve written about this from different angles (here’s one), but one challenge of being able (or at least, having the impression that one is able) to know about an extremely wide (global) set of events at any and all moments means that it’s possible for me to mis-spend my mental and emotional energy. If I spend all day worrying (not praying - that’s different) about a war which I really can do nothing about, I have spent a day not doing the things that have been entrusted to me to do, be they as small as doing the laundry or as simple as being cheerful to the people around me.
More and more I am convinced that this is a tactic C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape would advise! If your human has discerned and said yes to a project, and has managed to say no to many other projects while still saying yes to people, then by all means distract her with the worries of the whole world, such that she doesn’t actually live in her own present moment where God is to be found.
More and more I’m finding wisdom in St. Teresa of Avila’s “God walks among the pots and pans.”
4. Writing it down and having a default
This sounds wildly obvious, but writing down what I wanted to do/ felt called to take on, and then routinely looking at what I had written was a game changer. I’m a visual learner, so the looking part is really key for me.
What it’s meant is that in any given week, I have something that tells me: when in doubt, work on x.
Having a written default means that I don’t need to make daily decisions about what to do with my time. Daily decisions are exhausting. (Imagine if every day you had to decide whether or not to brush your teeth. The drama! The back-and-forth! The pros-and-cons! I’m tired just thinking about it.)
Of course, not everything is in my power: sometimes I don’t sleep well and then my mind has trouble forming sentences; sometimes I’m reliant on other people to help; sometimes computers glitch (ugh). So, I can’t always do exactly what I’d planned to do - I’m not a robot. But in general, I had a default to turn to, one in my own handwriting that stared at me from the page, and kept me on track.
What about you? Did you start the year with specific goals? A general vision? How’s it going? Have other more important things arisen in the meantime? Has the siren song of distraction lured you away? Are you looking for a fresh start?
And of course if you’d like to harness the cool breeze energy of a new academic year to set fresh goals or discern other changes, I’d be happy to explore the possibility of working together 1:1.