Happy New Year!
- Guthrie Brown
- Jan 1
- 3 min read
January 1, 2026 | Issue #24 | Here Nor There
Dear Friend,
Happy New Year.
I do hope Christmas and the ending to 2025 was everything you wanted it to be, along with what you needed it to be. As this year begins, rather than starting with resolutions or grand declarations, I wanted to try to begin with something slower. So, I’m letting this newsletter, this space [right here], breathe a little differently.
Instead of long essays and segmented sections, Minds In Motion is becoming a monthly collection of field notes of such, like a shared notebook in ways.
These field notes aren’t conclusions, or grand epiphanies. They’re subtly sweet observations— questions, quotes, truths and facts— gathered along each day through the month. Offered without urgency, and without the need to resolve them into something neat. Shared as they are, still in motion.
Sitting at my desk, I take in the scattered remnants of the season: post it’s, half-finished to-do lists, a small assortment of Christmas presents that are marinating in their boxes waiting to be put away.
That weird blip of space in-between time, neither here nor there. One long breath held somewhere between effort and ease.
I noticed how easily my attention seemed to wander, in the things I reached for instinctively, the memories my thoughts drifted back to, the quiet places I avoided, and the aspirations that continue to keep the passion burning. Things always seem so much clearer in hindsight, at the start or at the end of something. It’s only when we step back that we can hear how the days speak to one another, revealing a shape, no, some kind of pattern that we didn’t realize we had been tracing all along.
"For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice." —T.S. Eliot
3 SMALL OBSERVATIONS
One pattern I seemed to notice more: Nostalgia as the current flowing under each day. How easily the past drifted in and out. Old songs, old versions of myself, places that no longer exist as they once did. Not like longing so much as a subtle reminder of how many selves I’ve already lived.
One quiet truth that kept reoccurring: The people that complain the most about not having enough time are the ones rushing through the holidays, rushing to the redlight, always in a frantic rush.
One question that stayed with me: How much of my sense of urgency comes from the calendar and how much of it is truly mine?
A Gentle Practice
This is not a tip, more of a noticing exercise, pause to question, or a habit attempted.
As this new month begins, try noticing where your attention goes without being pulled, rushed, or time stamped. No fixing. No optimizing. Just observe what you return to naturally when nothing is demanding your focus.
There are often more answers and honesty there than we may expect.
[closing thought]
2025—what a remarkably interesting year it was, challenging in all the ways that ask us to grow. I remain in awe of this life we’re all moving through together. And now, onward we go, into the great unknown… salutations, aloha, kon’nichiwa, bonjour, nǐ hǎo… welcome, 2026.
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." —Søren Kierkegaard
Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
Guthrie
Comments