What Stayed With Me

An End-of-Year Reflection

“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

Every year around this time, we’re asked what we learned. As if life hands out tests. As if growth arrives on schedule. But when I look back, nothing is that organized.

What stands out isn’t what changed, it’s what refused to.

The patterns that followed me. The tensions that didn’t resolve, even when I wanted them to.

Not everything that stays is broken, and not everything that stays is a lesson. Some things remain simply because they’re still asking to be noticed.

What stayed wasn’t dramatic. No defining moments. No one conversation that split things into before and after. It was subtler than that.

A restlessness that showed up even on good days. A familiar resistance right before committing to something. A way of overthinking decisions that didn’t require that much thinking. None of it was new. That’s the unsettling part.

I’d met all of it before, just not with this proximity. This year, it felt less like discovery and more like recognition, and recognition is different. It doesn’t arrive with excitement. It arrives with honesty.

I stopped asking why these things were still around. Stopped treating them like unfinished business, and stopped assuming their presence meant I was behind.

Some patterns don’t repeat because we failed to learn. They repeat because we’re still in relationship with them.

And maybe that’s not a problem to solve, maybe it’s a reality to sit with.

I’ve noticed the reflex kick in. The familiar urge to do something with all of this. To turn persistence into insight. Repetition into a lesson. Discomfort into a takeaway.

We’re very good at converting lived experience into something that sounds like progress. There’s comfort in meaning-making. It gives shape to what would otherwise feel unresolved. It lets us believe that nothing lingers without permission. But I’m no longer convinced that everything that stays is here to teach me something.

Some things remain because they haven’t been rushed out. Because they weren’t reframed too fast. Because they weren’t turned into a story that made me feel competent again.

We confuse understanding with control. As if naming something fully means we’re done with it. This year, I felt the difference.

Meaning, when forced, has a strange way of flattening experience. It turns texture into narrative. It replaces presence with interpretation. So I let a few things remain undefined.

Not because I couldn’t explain them, but because explaining them felt like an exit.

And I wasn’t ready to leave yet.

So instead of asking what all of this meant, I started asking something else.

What would it be like to stay? Not to fix. Not to resolve. Not to extract a lesson and move on. Just to remain in contact.

There’s a difference between carrying something and being in relationship with it. Carrying is weight. Relationship is attention.

When I stopped treating certain patterns as problems, they changed texture. They didn’t disappear, but they softened. They stopped demanding answers and started allowing presence. Some of the tension I’d been feeling wasn’t asking to be eliminated. It was asking not to be abandoned. That surprised me.

We’re taught that progress means moving past things. Outgrowing them. Leaving them behind like outdated versions of ourselves. But there’s another kind of progress that doesn’t look like movement at all. It looks like staying long enough for resistance to loosen.

This year, I didn’t overcome much. What I did, was stop flinching.

And in that stillness, something happened. What stayed no longer felt like an obstacle. It felt like a companion I’d finally stopped arguing with.

Of course, the calendar will mark this as an ending. It always does.

Numbers will change. Language will shift. We’ll call what comes next a new year, as if novelty were built into the date itself.

But nothing I’m carrying seems to recognize that boundary.

The questions didn’t check the time.

The patterns didn’t pack their bags.

What stayed with me this year shows no interest in being left behind.

And that feels… honest.

Maybe time isn’t asking us to conclude anything. Maybe it’s just offering a pause, a brief collective inhale where we notice what’s still here before we name what’s next.

I don’t feel the need to close anything out.

I don’t feel behind for not having clarity.

Some things deserve continuity more than conclusions.

So if the year insists on ending, I’ll let it without pretending that anything essential has been wrapped up.

So I’m not stepping into whatever comes next with a plan. I’m stepping into it with awareness.

Aware of what followed me. Aware of what didn’t leave when it had the chance. Aware that not everything needs to be resolved to be respected.

What stayed with me this year isn’t a verdict or a lesson.

It’s a presence.

Maybe the work isn’t to turn the page, but to notice what’s still written between the lines, and keep reading, slowly, on purpose.