#Sunday 44: Welcome to the Beginning of the End of the Year

Nov 1, 2026 · @Dr Rosalie

Welcome to the beginning of the end of the year

Aloha, and happy November. Today is the first of the month, the forty-fourth Sunday of 2026, and there are exactly nine Sundays left this year, including today. I did not plan to begin November with a number, but the number is the point. Nine Sundays is not a lot. Nine Sundays is also enough.

A particular feeling arrives when the calendar turns to November. The year is no longer young; the plans we made in January have either become habits or become memories, and the finish line is close enough to see but not close enough to coast toward. It is the beginning of the end. I have decided to treat that phrase not as a lament but as an invitation, the way a trailhead sign invites you onto the last and best stretch of a hike.

On my walk this morning, the light came in low and gold across the water, the way it does when the year itself seems to be leaning toward rest. I thought about how much of 2026 I spent in motion: a dissertation carried through its final chapters, a move across an ocean, a family gathered in a new place, clients served, students taught, a grandmother's adventure book written and read aloud. Motion is good. But motion without a pause becomes drift, and drift is how a year ends without anyone deciding how it should end.

So this Sunday is for three things, and the next eight Sundays will carry them forward. Pause. Reflect. Plan to be amazing. Three thinkers have walked beside me this year, and each one has something to say about one of those three movements: Daniel Goleman about pausing, Caroline Myss about reflecting, and Carl Jung about what it means to plan a life that is actually yours.

Pause: the discipline Goleman calls self-awareness

The first thing we skip when we are busy is the pause, and the pause is the only place where honesty lives. Daniel Goleman (1995) placed self-awareness at the foundation of emotional intelligence for a reason. Before we can manage ourselves, motivate ourselves, read other people, or lead anyone, we have to notice what is actually happening inside us, in real time, without flinching.

Goleman described self-awareness as a kind of neutral attention, an ongoing awareness of one's own feelings that neither drowns in them nor pretends they are not there. That is harder than it sounds in November. November is when the inner voice starts keeping score: what did not get done, what got done badly, who we disappointed, including ourselves. Self-awareness is not that voice. Self-awareness is the quieter witness who can hear that voice and say, "Noted. Now, what is true?"

In his later work on attention, Goleman (2013) argued that focus is a trainable capacity and that a wandering, overloaded mind is not a character flaw but an untrained one. The pause is the training. On a walk, it is the moment I stop at the top of the hill and simply breathe before deciding whether to keep going. In a year, it is the first Sunday of November.

So here is this week's practice, and it is deliberately small. Sit for ten minutes with a cup of something warm and ask one question: How am I, actually? Not how is the work, not how is the family, not how is the to-do list. How am I? Write down whatever comes, even if it is unflattering. Goleman would say that the data you gather in that pause is the raw material for every good decision you will make between now and December 31.

Reflect: Myss and the contracts we did not know we signed

Once you have paused, you can reflect, and reflection is where Caroline Myss becomes the right companion. In Sacred Contracts, Myss (2001) proposed that each of us arrives with a set of agreements, commitments to learn particular lessons, to meet particular people, to grow in particular directions, and that our lives are the unfolding of those agreements whether we are aware of them or not. The work of a reflective life is to become aware.

I find this idea most useful at the end of a year, because it changes the question. The ordinary question is, What did I accomplish? The Myss question is, What was I being asked to learn, and did I learn it? Those are not the same. A year can be full of accomplishment and empty of learning, and a year can look quiet from the outside and be the most important year of a life.

Myss also wrote about the archetypes that move through us, the patterns we live out without naming them: the Caretaker, the Teacher, the Pilgrim, the Child who still wants to be seen. She asked her readers to notice which archetypes had the wheel in a given season, and whether they were driving toward the person we are meant to become or circling an old wound. I will confess that 2026 handed me a Pilgrim archetype I did not ask for. I crossed an ocean. I left a familiar landscape and arrived in one I am still learning to read. The Pilgrim is not comfortable. The Pilgrim is also, as Myss would say, exactly on schedule.

Reflection, then, is not an inventory. It is a reading of the year as a text, looking for the pattern underneath the events. Try it this week with a single page. Draw a line down the middle. On the left, write the five or six things that actually happened to you in 2026, the big ones. On the right, next to each one, write what you suspect it was teaching you. Do not edit. Myss would say the right-hand column is the real story of the year, and nobody else can write it for you.

Plan to be amazing: Jung and the self that is still arriving

And now the part that sounds like a slogan and is actually the hardest of the three. Plan to be amazing. I do not mean amazing in the way a vision board means it, with the car and the house and the beach. I mean it in the way Carl Jung meant it when he described individuation, the lifelong process by which a person becomes, more and more fully, the particular self they were always meant to be (Jung, 1933).

Jung was clear that this process does not finish in youth. He wrote that the afternoon of life has its own program, and that we cannot live the afternoon according to the program of the morning, because what was true at twenty has become a lie at sixty (Jung, 1933). I read that line differently now than I did a decade ago. The tasks of the morning are acquisition: a career, a family, a name. The tasks of the afternoon are integration: gathering up everything we became, including the parts we hid, and making one whole, honest person out of it. That is the amazing I am planning for.

Jung also insisted that the parts of ourselves we refuse to look at, the shadow, do not disappear. They go underground and run the show from there (Jung, 1938). A year-end plan built only on our strengths and our bright intentions will quietly be sabotaged by whatever we left unexamined. That is why the pause and the reflection have to come first. You cannot plan a whole life from half a self.

So the planning I am inviting is not a list of goals. It is a question Jung might have asked: What does the next version of me need in order to arrive, and what in the current version is standing in the doorway? For me, this November, the answer involves saying yes to the new landscape instead of grieving the old one, and finishing what the Pilgrim year started. Your answer will be different. But it will be yours, and that is the only kind of amazing that lasts.

Here is the week's third practice. Write one sentence that begins, "By the last Sunday of this year, I will have become someone who..." Not someone who has done, someone who has become. Then write one sentence about what you are willing to lay down in order to make room. Jung would call the first sentence the ego's intention and the second the beginning of the real work.

Nine Sundays

Nine Sundays. One is nearly spent, and it has been a good one. Eight remain, and I intend to use each as a small station on the way to December: a place to pause, reflect, and check whether the person I am planning to become is still the one walking the path.

I would love for you to walk it with me. Take the three practices from this post- the ten-minute pause, the two-column page, the two sentences- and give them this week. Then come back next Sunday, and we will build on them. If you are willing, write to me and tell me what the right-hand column of your page says. I will read every one.

Welcome to the beginning of the end of the year. It will be amazing, and not by accident.

Mahalo for walking with me.

References

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. Bantam Books.

Goleman, D. (2013). Focus: The hidden driver of excellence. HarperCollins.

Jung, C. G. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul (W. S. Dell & C. F. Baynes, Trans.). Harcourt, Brace & World.

Jung, C. G. (1938). Psychology and religion. Yale University Press.

Myss, C. (2001). Sacred contracts: Awakening your divine potential. Harmony Books.