Finishing the Chapter with Intention

As the month of December begins, your schedule is likely filling up. In your professional life, you have a few more weeks until winter break. There are activities to plan and content to teach. You are probably considering how to make the holiday season special for each and every student, who may or may not have the privilege of guaranteed celebration at home. In your personal life, events may be accumulating and the tasks are growing. There are beautiful, bright moments to be sure! But perhaps some bitter is intermingling with the sweet during this season.

In the midst of these varying calls for our attention, I invite you to pause, take a breath, and reflect on how you would like to close out the year of 2023. We have twenty-seven days until we ring in a new year. Often this comes with fresh starts and lofty goals, and these are wonderful things! But perhaps for now, you need a moment to create an intentional ending to the year we are journeying through now. Your year may have been filled with joyful events and celebratory moments. Your year may have brought more tears and sorrow than you could have imagined. Or maybe it was an illogical compilation of both. These past eleven months have written a part of your story. Take some time in the coming days and weeks to reflect on your past few chapters and decide how you want the ending of this chapter to look like.