Around the corner is 2026, and with it the familiar knock of resolutions—polite at first, then increasingly insistent. They ask what you will fix, improve, or optimize. They arrive with lists and momentum and the subtle demand to become more.
But this year, let’s pause before answering.
If you’ve been wanting to incorporate a little philosophy into your days, as a way to taste and test ideas in daily life, we can see how thinkers like Weil or Kierkegaard might season the way we pay attention, choose, and move through this new year.
Let us noodle on quality as an ingredient. Something whose flavor changes the whole dish without overpowering it. Quality of attention. Quality of presence. Quality of what we allow ourselves to touch, hold, and respond to.
Simone Weil wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. Attention not as productivity, not as insight delivery, not as performance—but as devotion. As a way of being with what is, without trying to improve it on contact.
Notice how quickly we move toward explanation. Toward meaning-making. Toward insight. It’s a reflex born of intelligence, training, usefulness, even discomfort—and also of distance. Insight can sometimes be a way of staying just far enough away from the thing itself.
So let’s wonder what would happen if we offered less insight
and more presence.
Living more slowly feels essential to this. Slow enough to notice when we’ve stopped paying attention and started narrating instead. Slow enough to feel the weight of a moment before deciding what it means.
Weil believed that real attention requires a kind of self-emptying—a consent to not impose oneself on the world. That feels like relief. To not be responsible for constant clarity. To not rush toward coherence. To allow mystery to remain intact.
Authenticity, as Kierkegaard shows, is another ingredient to include. It’s not about performance or perfection, but about choosing yourself again and again, even in uncertainty. It’s about being present with your own inner life, with all its anxiety, doubt, and inwardness. As he might put it: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Choosing yourself in the moment—without needing all the answers—is its own kind of devotion.
So if we have a resolution as 2026 approaches, it could be this:
To practice attention as an act of respect.
To let fewer things matter—and tend to them well.
To resist the urge to extract meaning too quickly.
To be present enough that insight, if it comes, arrives on its own.
To choose ourselves, in truth, again and again.
Understanding can wait.
Being here and supporting ourselves cannot.
And maybe that is enough to begin.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 