Kimberly O'Connor

Hello friends,

I think I’ve posted exactly once since May, which began one of the very worst periods of my life so far (and hopefully, ever, but time will tell!). I won’t share the dirty details here, but I’ll say that 2025 kicked off for real with a panic attack set off by an executive order, and in retrospect, that was nowhere near the low point! Good times.

So, I’m welcoming 2026 with a series of posts: today, by sharing a few things I’ve learned this year; tomorrow, with an invitation to give to a nonprofit I love; some poems for the week between Christmas and New Year’s; and on New Year’s Eve, with an announcement of a goal I’ve set for myself.

Here are a few things I’ve learned in 2026:

Draw a circle around your feet, and that’s what you can control. This is a popular slogan in recovery groups. I’ve learned this lesson before, or so I thought, but 2025 seared it into my consciousness. Once again, I learned to come back to myself, my own behavior, and my own life. Just mine: my own thoughts, behaviors, and actions are the only things I can control. There is peace, hope, and even in this lesson, once you embrace it. I’ve ended the year with a retreat to an ashram, writing dates with myself, and a shit ton of yoga classes.

Everyone is suffering. No matter how it looks from the outside, we are all struggling. When I’ve opened up to people this year about what I’ve experienced, often they’ve responded by telling me their own stories of loss, grief, health challenges, and more. We can feel so isolated, and like everyone else is living in the happily-ever-after, but that’s not the case. I forget this on a daily basis and have a short (or days-long) pity party till I remember my next lesson, which is:

You can decide to love your life. In early December, I listened to an interview with Louise Glück an episode of What It Takes. In the show’s opening, someone (I don’t know who!) says “Every day I wake and decide, today I’m going to love my life. Decide.” I will find out who said this eventually!

I thought about this intentional embracing of the realities of life a lot over the past weekend, in which Golden experienced high winds and dry, warm weather, so in order to prevent wildfires, the power company shut off our electricity for the better part of 72 hours. As glad as we all were not to have wildfires, my neighbors and I were knocked off kilter–our routines so revolve around this amazing thing we call electricity and take for granted. One evening, wandering in the 4 PM twilight, I remembered the words I recently scrawled in dry erase marker on my bathroom mirror: I decide to love my life. I loved the darkness, the battery-powered candles, the battery-powered white noise machine in my bedroom, batteries in general. I loved the 50-degree low that night–it meant we wouldn’t be too cold. I loved the not-burning mesa and the sliver of moon above it. I loved my health, which does not require machines that run on electricity. I loved the fancy grocery store with its buffet that includes mac and cheese I could get for dinner, and the money I have that lets me buy it. I loved the nearby family ready and waiting to offer me their shower and a bed if I needed it. I loved the incredible luck and privilege of the fact that being without power to prevent a wildfire is my share of the global climate burden at that moment–not a wildfire itself, not a flood, not a famine.

That we can love our lives even when they are not perfect is a lesson I’ve been trying to learn as a child, when I would list my worries on a post-it and think I’d be happy and calm once I’d crossed them all out. 40 plus years later, I’m starting to suspect I’ll never be worry free–but I can decide to love my life in the meantime.

How about you? If you can, today, lay down on the floor (this is a vital step) until you can identify something you can decide to love about your life.

Photo by Shyam on Unsplash