I’ve been feeling that I should write a 2025 reflection for this December 2025 journal entry. That’s what you do at the end of the year, right? But the more I tried to begin, the more I realised how impossible it felt to summarise a year. Especially one where the most important changes haven’t been visible.
What I’ve been circling, especially as the year has been drawing to a close, is something quieter: a growing understanding of how my creative process actually works, and why it has taken me so long to feel able to let more meaningful work come through.
Progress has felt blocked:
Overthinking is problematic. I know this. I thought I knew this! However, it is one thing to know something and another to have a genuine alternative. Behaviours are learned one way or another as a means to navigate experience and interact with the world.
Learning to meditate has been a useful step. Every time you return to the focus of the meditation you are learning to let go. In any one moment there is too much to sense. So it seems to me that you must have letting go as your starting point. This leaves you free to actively choose where to apply focus. But where should this be?
Because there is so much to discover, to see, to consider, to do, it is tempting to jump between ideas. I have been jumping between modes: from raw personal feeling to some finished project.
Being alert to the freedom we have, and how things really are, feels important to me. However, this can be paralysing (think Satre/Existentialism).
I have felt full, but blocked; like I have a lot to say, but don’t know how to say it through my chosen medium.
In moving on from all this the following ideas have felt like meaningful discoveries:
Insight is found through action. “I know who I am when I see what I do” (David Epstein). I have a new appreciation for the utterly essential act of intentional practice. There is faith in stepping into a new activity. You can’t know where it will lead. Overthinking this will result in inaction. The truth is, one step will lead to the next. No steps lead nowhere.
Technical skill (which you need in order to realise your ideas) requires repetition and depth. This does not mean repetition in the mechanistic sense. This means, returning to the bench. It means honouring the muse. It means putting in the work in the form of intentional practice.
The faith referenced above requires you to accept that not everything you produce will be good. But what is not good tells you what you don’t like; and the consequence of this is a lesson in what you do like; what you do want to learn; where you need to develop skill. In other words, what is not good provides a new direction for your next bit of intentional practice.
I have learned that meaning comes through making, not before it. I have been under the false apprehension that I must understand and know before I can make. This way of thinking will hold you back. Meaning emerges as you work.
The missing piece of the puzzle and staying close to the work:
The big discovery which makes 2026 so exciting for me is that I have begun to think about my process as working through layers: from immediate noticing, through metaphor, and only then into form, colour and material. This is exciting.
So, I cannot promise any big exciting projects next year because I don’t yet know what will emerge. But, I am gently committing to continue to intentional practice, which I will share as I go.
For now, I am going to focus on staying close to the work, noticing, making, and letting meaning emerge in its own time.
I wish you the very best in whatever you are working on, and in making sense of this big little life.
Ed