Principal’s Message January 2025
Just before the Christmas holiday I was getting my nails done with my daughter, and her young nail tech asked her if she was making any New Year’s resolutions. They bantered back and forth, sharing some of their ideas of what their resolutions were going to be and I listened intently, but all the while hoping they wouldn’t ask me what my resolutions were going to be. I didn’t want to burst their bubble or dampen their enthusiasm for the old adage “New Year New Me”, but you see I gave up making New Year’s resolutions many years ago. The reason I don’t make resolutions any more is because I know from personal experience, and tons of research, that no matter how well-intentioned we may be, most resolutions quickly decline in the first few weeks of the new year. Even those who start out the strongest are more than likely going to falter within weeks, if not days of the New Year. In fact, research shows that more than 80% of people’s New Year’s resolutions fail by the second week of February. I don’t like those odds so instead I have tried different approaches to marking the New Year in a meaningful way and over the years have shared some with our school community.
Keeping a Gratitude Journal or Gratitude Jar has served me well for many years and is always a great idea. Instead of looking to make drastic changes we can just focus on all the good things we do have in our lives already and record it so we can look back and realize how rich and fulfilling our lives really are. It’s not really a resolution, but rather a practice, and it tends to be easier to stick with.
Over the past two or three years I have shared the idea of implementing a Word of the Year in lieu of resolutions. This is a fun way to set intentions or focus for the new year ahead and is a far more flexible approach than making resolutions. Instead of a rigid resolution, that more than likely will fall by the wayside, the Word of the Year can act as a constant, yet gentle, reminder to focus on creating change.
While reading a New Year’s Message from a Canadian content creator, I was intrigued by the Word of the Year that she had chosen for 2025. It was ROCKS! Rocks? Really? I immediately thought she might be taking up rock climbing as a new sport and form of exercise or maybe she was going to finally take those electric guitar lessons she has been thinking about for years now. Like I said, I was intrigued so I did read further, and I was so glad I did. You see when she said “rocks” was going to be her Word of the Year, she was referencing a story that has been circulating for several years about filling a jar with rocks, pebbles and sand, and how best to do that. The exercise has been attributed to a Philosophy Professor, but no one is really 100% certain of its origins. Regardless, it is a beautiful metaphor for our lives and what we focus our attention on. Making “rocks” her WOTY is meant to be a reminder to her about how she wants to live out 2025, where she wants to place her priorities and what she should simply discard or put on the back burner.
If we can see the jar as our life, the rocks as the most important things in our life, the pebbles the things in our life that matter but we could live without, and the sand everything else, it should be much easier to determine how we fill our jar this year. First, we can figure out what we want our rocks to be, the people, passions and priorities that truly bring joy and fulfillment. Then we can let the smaller stuff (the pebbles and the sand) find their place around them.
The last thing we want is to be in a position where we fill our jars with the pebbles and sand first, leaving little or no room for the rocks. Remember, life is short, so we should concentrate on making space for, and giving priority to, what matters the most.
So instead of being weighed down by unrealistic resolutions and unmet goals, how about focusing on a Word of the Year and why not make it “ROCKS”. We should start by looking inward and asking ourselves what do we need? what’s in our way? and what needs to go? Remember this is not a task to be achieved but rather a new, improved way of being. An awesome way to approach a New Year ahead of us.
As we begin this new year, I hope that 2025 is the year that we can all find our rocks and clear away the unnecessary sand, bringing us that much closer to a life of JOY.
Onward,
Marie Bates
Principal