A Gentle Sorting

Letting go of noise and unfulfilling relationships, choosing steadiness

I like the new year best when I treat it like a threshold, not a finish line. A place where you pause with your hand on the doorframe and notice what you have been carrying. What has fed you. What has drained you. What you’re still holding simply because you got used to its weight.

Not every year calls for a big clearing. Most years don’t. Most years I simply keep living, adjusting quietly, learning as I go. But I try to keep a kind of inner hygiene before I step into a new season. A gentle sorting.

What belongs in the life I’m building now. What have I learned.

This year, I’m travelling home to Denmark with my youngest son. Not to escape, but to return. I want to be close to the landscapes and people I love. There are places that hold us without questions. The sea air. The low winter light. The feeling of being known by a horizon. I want to start the year near that kind of steadiness.

And I already know what I don’t want to bring with me into 2026.

I don’t want doom scrolling. That restless grazing on other people’s fear and urgency, or other people’s ideas. I want to create more myself. I want my mind to feel less crowded.

I don’t want relationships where I never really felt appreciated. Where I felt like entertainment, or never important enough to be asked about my wellbeing or my dreams.

I don’t want Netflix while eating, that small disappearance from my own life. I don’t want my phone in the bathroom, as if no silence is allowed to exist. And I don’t want to be half present with my children. Not when they are awake and needing me. Not when their stories arrive like birds, sudden and bright, and I’m looking down at a screen instead of up at them.

Some of these things aren’t sins. They’re just weeds. They grow where attention is thin. And they quietly take up room.

What I do want to bring with me is something old, and somehow still radical.

The sabbath.

I’m not religious. However, I’ve always appreciated traditions and rituals, the way they create a shelter in time. Every Friday we honor the sabbath. We light candles. We say blessings our way. We appreciate what we have. We tell stories about the good things we wish for each other in the week to come. And we put away our phones until the next day.

It feels like tending a small fire, not for show, but for warmth. A practice of staying human. A reminder that life isn’t only what we produce, consume, or broadcast. Life is also what we notice when the room gets quiet. It’s the bread on the table. The faces we love. The soft return of our own thoughts.

The world is rushing. The noise is thick. Political and religious violence takes up more and more room in the conversation, and in the body. So I’m turning inward. Toward family. Toward calm. Toward anonymity.

Not as indifference, but as care.

I don’t need to brag or shout about my actions or doings. I want my days to be sturdy and honest, like well-made tools. I want to live in a way that holds. As Henry David Thoreau said, I want to live deliberately.

So this is my new year’s intention.

Less screen. More gaze.
Less consuming. More sensing.
Less performative connection. More real belonging.
Less noise in the mind. More room for what’s true.

If the year is a garden, then I’m not trying to control every season. I’m simply choosing what I plant. What I water. What I stop feeding. And what I let go of, with gratitude for what it taught me, and with relief for the space it leaves behind.

I’m stepping into 2026 with lighter pockets.

Happy New Year, Wild Ones!

— Kajsa Li