A Decade Past
By: Kaitlyn S. C. Hatch
Tags: Reflections, Intentions, Goals, New Year

As I’ve gotten older, the magnitude of the New Year has diminished. When I was a kid and young adult, it was a significant night of celebration. I tried to make New Year’s Eve perfect as if this would bear on how the next year would play out.



The first change came when I stopped drinking and started maintaining regular bedtime hours. Staying awake until midnight felt more like an endurance test than something I wanted to do, although I still continued this tradition for several years.



On the cusp of 2018, I chose, instead of pushing my body to stay up three hours past my usual bedtime, to go to bed at my normal time on New Year’s Eve. I woke the first day of the New Year refreshed and well-rested, with no regret for having missed the stroke of midnight. Last year was the second year taking this approach and the first year that my wife and I spent the afternoon on New Year’s Eve filling in the Year Ahead workbook offered by yearcompass.com. Along with aiding the night’s rest, it infused me with a lovely energy come New Year’s Day. I reviewed and let go of things from the previous year and set intentions and goals for the year just beginning. Goals that felt entirely achievable after a proper night’s sleep.

Doing the Year Review on the last day of 2019 differed from doing it in 2018. This isn’t just the end of the year but the end of a decade. The workbook isn’t set up to review a whole decade of life, but I don’t think one could go through it without considering the close of the early 2000s and the start of the new 20s.

From 2010 to the end of 2019, my life has gone through considerable change. I moved to the UK in the first week of January 2010 — a move I thought might only be for a year. I ended up living in London for the next six years and travelling more than I had in the two-and-a-half decades prior. In the last decade, I have also gone from partnered to married to separated to divorced to single to partnered to married, a sequence that indicates for many when they’ve guessed me to be younger than I am.

Most astounding has been reflecting on the last decade of my practice. I began to study Buddhism and mediate in 2008, but it wasn’t until 2012 that I sought a community to practice with, and late 2013 when practice became central to my life. The last decade contains my first retreat, and the half a dozen that would follow including attending Yarne about six years after I first learned of it and decided it was something I would one day do. Every vow I’ve taken, empowerment I’ve received, and talk I’ve attended have been in the past ten years. The last five alone are the richest practice years of my life. Since 2015, I discovered the Radical Dharma community, become an official student of Pema Chödrön, and started Buddhist Chaplaincy training through the Upaya Zen Center.

As I reflect on how blessed my dharma path has been over the last ten years, I am curious to see how the next decade unfolds. 2020 marks the start of my second and final year of Chaplaincy training. Because I don’t have a Bachelor’s Degree I can’t do the ‘professional’ track, but the possibility of this informing my livelihood is there. Particularly as I’ve been focusing more on my aspirations as a writer and how my writing is a practice and a tool for supporting others in their spiritual growth.

As a species, we are facing very painful truths, not least of which being the already unfolding impacts of climate change. A lot will change in a decade. Whatever intentions I set now may look absurd or be irrelevant by 2029, so I’m making them with no real expectation on outcomes. I trust that my practice foundation is solid and, as a fellow Chaplaincy cohort member said to me, I have a fertile heart, that will guide me in what is coming.