Wonder, Whimsy, & Winter Curriculums

I wasn’t really thinking about the whole word of the year thing and then…

Over the weekend I had a delightful conversation with a long time friend/student from long ago, and she said some things that helped ideas in my own head that had been floating around for months to finally coalesce.

Word(s) of the year for 2026

Then my phrase of the year just became obvious. Like, I didn't have to think about it at all. It was just THERE... like something that grew out of the earth:

WONDER AND WHIMSY

So first question: Are you doing a word or phrase? Do you have it yet?

At the same time as I’ve been thinking about things that that conversation helped me to solidify, I’ve also been contemplating the idea of creating personal curriculums. It’s a cool thing going around on TikTok right now.

Personal Curriculum: What and How

We all consume a lot of media — whether online or via books or streaming... We take in a lot, but do we engage with the material?

Obviously some of it is just meant to kinda… pass through us. But there’s a lot that we take in and release that’s deserving of more of our time and attention and thought.

I miss this aspect of college and graduate school: reading literature and then sitting in a room of people who are also interested in literature and we’re dissecting and diving deep and extracting. We’re talking; we’re arguing; we’re writing papers.

And then those works really become a part of us. They inform our identity and how we view the world.

So for this personal curriculum idea, there are a few important components:

1. Pick questions to ask yourself. I saw one person working on the idea of good and evil, for example. Another was investigating how authoritarianism develops. But it doesn’t have to be that serious. I’m looking into redeveloping some sense of my original wonder and whimsy.

2. Put together a course and a time limit. I’ll be working from January through mid May. Like a college’s winter/spring semester.

3. Your course can have books, articles, movies. Whatever you want. You’re the professor here and the student. My course is the stack of books in the photo but I’m still developing it so that might change. (Or I should say, one of my courses.)

4. Have a notebook or some sort of cataloging/writing/thinking process in order before you start. I’ll be using a journal for the most part.

5. Bonus: have some people who are also doing this. Check in with each other. Maybe even have chats now and then to share what you’re excited about or stuck on.

And keep in mind, as I hinted at, you don’t have to stick to one curriculum. I’m developing this one, plus another designed to reignite my geek brain around movement and dance, and a third that is purely physical.

Furthermore, this personal curriculum is just one aspect of how I’ll be playing with and exploring the ideas of wonder and whimsy in 2026, and of course, I’ll keep you up to date now and then about what’s happening.

(May 2026 be better than this terrible year.)

"Breathe and wait" meets its perfect time of year

I’ve been yelling/teaching/prompting “breathe and wait” in classes since the earliest days of Girl on Fire Movement Studio (RIP beautiful studio). Now I tend not to say it enough (and I’ll be changing that). But also? I myself do not always really hear it even as it comes out of my own damn mouth.

And of course, this prompt is not just for movement class but it’s meant to — via movement classes — become so engrained in us that it leads in our wider lives.

Right now? This season of anticipation (advent, the coming solstice, all of it…) and this season of endings (calendars might be made up but they’re based on real things like the sun’s travels and the moon’s cycles)… it seems like the perfect season to really practice breathe and wait in our daily lives and rituals.

Instead of hustling more or seeing how much you can get done in these last days of this year (and how do we continue to hear that advice from the whole coaching community still???)… instead of hustling, let’s just stop.

Let’s breathe and wait.

Breathe and wait to see what peace we can find in these quiet darker days.

Breathe and wait to discern what’s working in our lives — from relationships to routines to work to practices of all kinds.

Breathe and wait.

Pause. Observe. Feel. Listen. Just wait.

Breathe and wait is always followed by allow but we’ll let that off to the side for now.

I felt myself going into hustle mode about halfway through November. I was freaking out about projects I didn’t accomplish this year and I was looking for ways to squeeze them in and luckily I noticed and I stopped.

These last days as we wind down are just not the time for that.

I’m going to focus on connection, rest, and simmering.

I’ll be breathing and waiting as I:

• Get back into paper based journaling and planners and what a joy this has been. Slowing down enough to write slowly instead of hammering away at a computer has been both difficult and delightful.

• Read more and more and more. And read more deeply. I’m planning a personal curriculum for the winter semester and I’ll be writing about that some time soon.

• Turn on twinkle lights and light candles and stretch in the evening on the floor with cats milling about.

• Dream about what’s possible without laying down any really solid plans.

• Connect to my loves and my inner circle of peeps.

What about you?

More steps to recovering my healthy brain: my algorithms

I’ve been taking a lot more steps beyond all of my movement to recover my healthier brain. So I’ll be writing about this much more over the coming months.

I had such a great experience of how much we control our algorithms this weekend. We know this, but a lot of the time we're not really owning the responsibility and we blame the platforms but they're just tools. (Please keep in mind that this isn’t about TikTok. That’s just my example.)

So my TikTok started out all fun and dance. I got it right after January 6th to deal with the stress. Over time, it become super politicized and I've been kinda drowning in that every time I go over there... but again... that's because THAT is what *I* was watching and engaging with.

Well, this weekend, I suddenly got obsessed with Journal Tok. This has been slowly seeping into my FYP (for you page/discover space) for some time, but this weekend, I stayed with the videos (and they can be longer form) and I engaged.

About the same time, some literary and philosophy academics had been hanging around my edges too so I started to really watch those. And then the witchy stuff. And some super liberal Catholic peeps.

So now?!?! My TikTok is like some fucking cozy cottage of all of my favorite things.

IT ACTUALLY SOOTHES MY NERVOUS SYSTEM. Yep.

I have more to say about those topics that I'm diving into specifically but this is a reminder that you are in charge of everything you put into your brain and body. (As Thich Nhat Hanh would say.)

I'm not suddenly taking some privileged road and not paying attention to the wider world. I still know all the things that are going on, BUT I have this little space where I can swim in dreams. (And intentionality but more on that soon.)