The Eightieth Question: From Rot Week to Rest Week
If somebody tells you they live to work, they're lying.
Welcome to the first 2025 edition of Asking the Question, and it’s Question #80!
Excited to write our way into another year together and to continue to build our journaling habits. So without further adieu, let’s get to it.
Answering the Question
Last week I hit you with our perennial end of year question, asking about the word you want to define your 2025.
Typically, I journal on this topic for a few weeks, and select whatever word feels right as the year closes and a new one begins. It’s a belief that the process will lead to the correct destination. If I keep grappling with the question, I’ll eventually land on the “right” answer.
Instead, this time I adjusted the process a bit. Whenever I sat down to explore the topic, I either started it or wrapped it up by free-writing a list of the words that felt most applicable or pertinent based on what I was feeling or expressing on the page. Once I felt like I had exhausted what I needed to say, I reviews those pages and tallied up all the instances of words that made repeat answers, showing up on two (or more) entries. I then spent a few entries grappling with those terms trying to visualize what a year lived under their guidance would look like. After writing them, I settled on a word by finding the vision that seemed closest to the 2025 I wanted to have.
From this process the honorable mentions, the words I left by the wayside, were:
Action
Make
Less
Speak
Pivot
This left me with one final word, my word of the year for 2025.
After a year about focus, it’s time for a year of presence.
Presence as Mindfulness
Mindfulness is an awfully broad term for what I mean here, but it’s the best way to encompass everything that presence means for me when it comes to the scope of activities I want it to encompass for my, well, mind.
In one capacity, it’s a continuation of focus, and encouraging me to continue single-tracking activities, and limiting distractions.
In another, it’s about trusting my gut and my instincts. Pairing observation and action. Finding time to hit pause simply because I can, rather than letting the tape keep playing.
And finally, it is about embracing feelings. Sitting in them. Observing them. Experiencing them in realtime rather than at 2x pace.
Presence as Profile
My year of focus was about helping me whittle down the areas in life where I want to invest my time. I culled the opportunities and invested more in preparing myself to pursue the dreams that actually mattered to me. But now, I have to pursue them.
This doesn’t mean building up a huge email list or social media following, but in doing more work to carve out my “one square foot of real estate” in the world.*
*We all get to take up a square foot in this world, which means we can’t take everything , and everyone, with us. But when we find that square foot, we attract the people who are supposed to be surrounding us there.
Now, I am here to build in the spaces that matter to me.
So what about you? What word, or words or phrase, has come to guide your 2025? Be sure to let me know!
Question #80
And with that, it’s time we dive into another year of journaling. To kick it off, I am turning some space over to my dear friend,
, who wrote this on her Substack, :Y’all. We are tired. Like, very tired. Soul-tired. The kind of tired that a good nap won’t fix. It’s chronic, it’s cultural, and it’s killing us. We’ve glamorized hustle and grind culture for too long, and it’s left us depleted. I wrote about this around election time, the other environmental crisis we’re not discussing. People across the nation are operating in survival mode, stretched thin by exhaustion, distrust, and the chronic stress of simply getting by. Every system we live in today—work, social media, home life, even our health systems—is so damaged and so misaligned with human needs that we’re beyond crisis mode. It’s time to flip the script. This is not the same as a “soft girl life” or a “soft girl era” either. A rest ethic isn’t about laziness—it’s about sustainability. It’s about living and working from a place of fullness, not collapse. My God-brother Kevin Stuckey has been leading the charge on this, and he’s right: rest isn’t just self-care—it’s a strategy directly from God. We can’t pour out if we’re empty.
So, I’m asking…
How do you rest? What’s your rest ethic?
Where did you learn your beliefs about rest?
When do you rest - regularly or when you’re tired/expired?
What are your signals that you need rest?
How do you promote rest for others?
What happens to you without rest?
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See you next week. Excited to be at it together again.