My Yearly Theme

If you haven’t already heard, 2020 has sucked across the board. It’s torn families apart, caused a dramatic shift in our daily lives, and severed connections left and right. It’s going to be weird to walk into a grocery store and not see people wearing masks or those pesky one-way aisles. So many times I’ve found myself wishing for the opportunity just to see people again, in one way or another. At some times, Zoom just doesn’t cut it.

I’m a junior in high school, and at some points, you’re just not prepared for the onslaught of work and commitments that flood your life. This August, that happened to me. I found the lackadaisical attitude that governed my summer quickly swept away by admissions tests, Calculus homework, and crazy teachers. I lost control of myself for a while in this past semester, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was happy to be surrounded by friends from school and forge connections that had disappeared from my life completely for 5 months, but I found myself trapped in my room, doing homework that I didn’t want to do, and in the scant amount of time I didn’t have things to do, I started to bemoan the commitments for the week ahead. It was devastating and painful, and I know that many others have suffered the same in quarantine.

Over time, though, I managed to get my head out of my misery and instead focus on the better things in life. I was safe, I hadn’t had any family members with the virus, I had a safe school atmosphere that allowed me to get in-person learning without a fear of contracting COVID, I still could get in contact with my friends and do some of what I enjoyed… the list goes on. It was during the very end of the first semester, only mere weeks ago, when it hit me that school wasn’t the only thing in life that truly mattered, and the happiness that I got from a good grade on a paper or the compliment from a teacher wasn’t having the profound influence on my mood or my productivity that I thought they would.

These little sparks of joy, I decided, are fleeting and immaterial. We don’t hold them close or cherish them, because the minute we get the satisfaction of very hard work paying off, the rush of excitement and pleasure that we get fades away, only to be replaced by more worry about the things ahead of us. We too often find ourselves, as cheesy as it sounds, living in the future and not in the moment.

So, I stepped far outside my comfort zone and resolved to try something new for 2021. Something to counteract this vicious cycle, and to remind myself to focus on what I liked to do instead of simply trying to negate the difficult emotions that I experienced day after day and week after week. I made a yearly theme.

I first heard about yearly themes from a podcast called Cortex (a great one, by the way), and I wanted to very briefly summarize the methodology behind a yearly theme versus the often stigmatized New Year’s Resolution. Resolutions are things that we set for ourselves without concrete motivation behind them or real desire for change. Even in my very young life, with the resolutions that I set, they often fade from memory by late January, if not earlier. Our day-to-day life is far to busy these days for us to made a profound, fundamental change.

Themes are extremely different. When we make a resolution, we are almost always trying to stop something that we hate about ourselves. When we set a theme, we are providing a guide stone for the year, something to help us make decisions when we’re at a crossroads. A theme isn’t a concrete set of goals, but rather a central idea to motivate you in the year to come to set your sights on doing things that stick to your theme. For example, if your theme for the year is Self-Discovery, you aren’t saying to yourself that you don’t want to stay the way you are, but you’re instead making the conscious effort to do things that test your limits to further understand yourself. A theme is positive when a resolution is negative.

My theme for 2021 is focus. Now, I bet you’re asking, wasn’t your problem to begin with that you placed too much focus on things that didn’t benefit you in the long run? You’d be exactly right. I wanted some irony in my theme, because instead of focusing on my schoolwork and these little sparks of joy, I’m endeavoring to focus on the things that I care about and make me happy. I’m focusing on better connections and relationships, knowing when to say “no” to adding yet another commitment to the schedule, being at ease with myself and improving my mental and physical wellness, and most importantly, the things that I like to do.

But it’s not just that I want to do these things, I am going to do these things. A single word changing can have a dramatic effect on your psychological understanding of your theme and the goals you’re setting for yourself- saying that you want to accomplish your theme doesn’t mean anything. In fact, you’re actively admitting defeat with something like that. Instead, making an assertive statement (I *am* going to focus this year) beats your self-conscious side to the punch, and at least for me, proves to be far more effective in preparing yourself for your theme.

A theme, unlike a resolution, can also change, and should change by the end of the year. As long as I stick to it, my idea of focus should be different than what I’m thinking now, and I really hope it is. A year is a while. Your theme, therefore, lasts a while. By applying this theme as a guiding light for the year, the theme will change meaning over time. Resolutions are meaningless without constant devotion and action, but a theme is more of a practice than action; it’s being mindful of your decisions and knowing how to better manage your life according to your theme. Admittedly, themes should have minute and meaningful goals along the way (mine has some like learning new techniques of making coffee, improving my posture, starting a podcast, the list goes on…) but they are so much more than that. Themes are mindsets.

So here’s to 2021 being better than this horrible year! We don’t know how it’s going to unfold, but regardless of the nightmarish news cycles and cabin fever from the pandemic, I’m making the conscious decision to better my life just a little bit. My Year of Focus is only a couple days away, but I deeply hope that the things I learn from my yearly theme will stick to me far past 2021. I’d urge you, if you made it to this point, to try one out for yourself. Reach out to other people and get them to try it out, and together, let’s make 2021 be a year worth remembering. For the good things, that is.

I can’t wait to get started.