What touches me most in these student sessions is the articulated confusion over what to do. In that, I hear open-heartedness, I hear (as always) a place for learning strategies to help, and I hear the friction and tension and push-and-pull that learners live in all the time. The “what should I be doing?” or “how can I decide?” The sense that amidst all of the demands, it’s very hard to know what to do. 

Given that procrastination makes things worse in the long-run, why do learners (and all of us) procrastinate? Because we’re bored with the task and want to do something more interesting and fun; because we get distracted by and pulled into more immediately compelling activities; because the discomfort we feel in the face of the work we know we need to do is hard to sit with.

Whether you’re into wishing folks “happy new year!” with exuberance, or taking it quiet and slow; whether you vision board quarterly aims, or prefer to see how things organically unfold; this newsletter here, short and simple, is about how we can do some of this. How we can do this time of year—with practices that help us feel whole, with pushback against needing to do / buy anything.

If you know me personally or professionally, you know that I take a lot on. Sometimes I’ve been put down for that, and certainly I’ve been judged for it. Sometimes I lose the plot and get lost in werkwerkwerk. But, as my amazing friend and Awakened Learning’s Academic Resilience Learning Strategist Meg Houghton says, there’s a spirit behind my work, behind what might look like ‘just’ busyness.