It's not New Year Resolutions that will change your life...it's End of Year Relinquishments

There it is again: this glint, this shimmer on the horizon.

The end of December approaches and we start fantasizing about what we’re going to change: this time, we’ll be healthier, kinder, more organised, less afraid. We’ll pull our lives together at last. But the truth is, for most people, New Year’s resolutions feel like a fantasy because they’re exactly that: a dream of who we wish we could become, unanchored from who we really are.

But what if we looked at the end of the year differently? Instead of tallying up all the things we might gain in the New Year, why not ask instead what can we let go of? We don’t need another set of rules, more resolutions that tighten and pull. No, that’s not it at all. What would really change things is a kind of bravery, the courage to release whatever burdens we’re carrying, to simply set it down and walk on, free.

The Real Reason We Struggle at the End of the Year

There’s a reason that the last six weeks of the year feel so heavy. We’re swimming in nostalgia, splurging on spending and caught up in a tsunami of expectations. The holidays ask us to be cheerful, grateful and generous, yet we’re also often overworked, stretched thin and longing for some relief from the pressure.

There’s a darker side to this season. The end of the year stirs up unresolved emotions and unspoken disappointments, but we’re taught to mask them. We get trapped in cycles of nostalgia, filling the gaps with gifts and gatherings, convinced that if we can just get through it, we’ll be renewed come January.

Why Resolutions Fail

A Christmas Carol is a child's fantasy of human change. In a single night, Scrooge is able to reflect on his character and make amends. Literature from the 19th century onwards (ie from the point in human evolution from which our lives and careers were not inevitable replications of the lives and careers of our parents but involved an element of conscious choice and therefore responsibility for those choices), gifts us with a host of tortured characters who try to change their lives by sheer force of will, only to be crushed under the weight of their own expectations.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina tries to rebuild her life in a new vision of romance but is destroyed by it. Gatsby is propelled by a grand vision of self-reinvention but gets trapped by the very past he’s desperate to escape. What these characters teach us is that resolutions, by themselves, aren’t enough. They aren’t a remedy for the past; they’re often just a distraction from it.

Psychologically, resolutions don’t work because they force us to push ahead without letting go. We set a vision of who we should be but avoid asking why we feel the need to become that person in the first place. This sets up a cycle of striving and failing, a pendulum that swings back and forth between hope and disappointment, which is why most resolutions fail by February.

Relinquishment: The Art of Letting Go

Relinquishment, on the other hand, is powerful because it forces us to release rather than acquire. It’s not about rewriting the story; it’s about letting certain chapters end.

Relinquishment is not a demand on our future selves. It’s a gentle recognition of what no longer serves us. To relinquish something is to see it clearly: to hold it in your hands and decide that it’s time to set it down. You don’t need to know who you’re becoming to understand who you no longer want to be.

There’s a strange kind of freedom in letting things go, isn’t there? To relinquish, to set down a burden, an old grudge, that heavy, snagging thought leaves you suddenly lighter, your edges softer, space opening up around you. What you give up leaves a vacancy, yes, but one that breathes, that allows light in, that lets you move forward, unlatched. It’s a gift that only comes when you loosen your grip, when you dare to release, and in return, find yourself not emptier, but startlingly, beautifully whole.

The Process of Relinquishing What Holds You Back

Letting go isn't simple, it’s a negotiation with all the stubbornness of the self. And yet, here come the year’s final weeks, sweeping in with that familiar December breath, asking us to try: to see it all for what it really is, to ask ourselves what, or who, has gone stale. To ask what’s grown sharp-edged. What needs to be released.

Think of relationships first. People we cling to because they’ve been there forever, or because their presence has become a weight, a thread tangled in memory or duty. Isn’t it strange how we can stay knotted to a person even when it begins to feel brittle or burdensome? To step back, to loosen that knot, isn't a failure to care. It’s an act of trust, of belief that sometimes people need space to grow or simply drift in another direction.

Then there are things. Objects that have nestled into the corners, little totems of other times or selves we used to be. We keep them like fragments of an identity or a life we’re scared to leave behind. But maybe it’s simpler than that; maybe the things are just things, clutter sitting in the way of a clear mind, clear room, a new start. To release them is to give yourself a space that breathes again.

And then, the rituals and habits. The ways we’ve learned to live by doing the same thing, again and again, long past the point where they serve us. We do it for the comfort of routine, maybe, or the fear of what we’ll lose without it. But how else to open a window to joy, to something lighter, if we don’t start to ask: what feeds me and what empties me out? The rest, let it go.

Relinquishment: A Season of Release, Not Renewal

Relinquishment isn’t giving up; it’s choosing, deciding what goes forward and what stays behind. It’s the courage, isn’t it, to stand here and say: this is me, right now, and some things from then don’t belong in the now. So this time, before peering forward, try glancing back. Let go of what no longer fits, what clings but doesn’t sing in tune with you anymore. Imagine stepping into the New Year not with another set of rules but with less weight, more lightness, more space to breathe.

These last weeks of the year: they don’t ask for promises or vows scribbled down in lists. They ask for the grace to shed what’s tethering you, so you can walk forward, unlatched, and let the next season meet you, bare and open.