Forget Resolutions: Why We All Need a Year of Ritual
What Suleika Jaouad Teaches Us About How to Heal Ourselves by Being Vulnerable with Others
My new book A TIME TO GATHER: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us will be published on May 19, 2026 by Penguin Press. Pre-order is available today wherever you get your books. Thank you!
I didn’t make a resolution this new year. Instead, I tossed a banana into the Pacific.
Here’s why.
I’m following the lead of one of the more arresting voices in contemporary life and the creator of the #1 literary Substack.
I’m focusing less on what I won’t do and more on what I can do.
I’m embracing a year of ritual.
Every now and then a figure comes along with the superhuman ability to navigate the perilous tightrope of being both a public and a private person—especially one facing a terminal disease.
Suleika Jaouad is one such person.
After being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in her early twenties, Jaouad gave up her dream of being a war correspondent and instead became a correspondent of rewriting your dreams.
First she chronicled her medical journey in The New York Times column “Life, Interrupted.”
Then she followed that feat of bravery with an even greater feat—traveling around the country in a beat-up yellow camper to understand how people rebuild their lives after trauma. She captured that experience in her beloved memoir, Between Two Kingdoms.
When her cancer returned, she started The Isolation Journals, one of the earliest runaway Substacks with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
As someone who has been both public about my cancer experience and traveled around the country in a camper during my year as a circus clown, I am in awe of Jaouad’s ability to turn her private lifequakes into public affirmations of life.
Then this week she came for my heart once more.
In a now-viral post called “Against Resolutions,” Jaouad writes that after many years of articulating and abandoning heartfelt-but-unattainable annual goals (run a half-marathon during chemo!), she gave up resolutions altogether.
“Not because I stopped wanting change—but because I stopped trying to become someone else. The desire to work on myself never went away. It simply lost its appetite for spectacle. And so, in place of resolutions, I turned toward ritual.”
Be still my beating heart!
As regular readers of The Nonlinear Life will know, I have spent the last two years deeply immersed in the modern world of ritual—mass baptisms, green funerals, sound healing, sauna-and-cold plunging, miscarriage circles, house cleansings, mastectomy gatherings. Just yesterday I entered my first-ever sensory deprivation tank.
If it involves rituals, moments of self-reflection, and deep connection, I’ve tried it.
Jaouad perfectly captures how the most effective rituals are private acts that perform a public service.
“Rituals are gentler than resolutions,” she writes. “Where resolutions chase outcomes, rituals attend to process.”
She goes on to describe how Georgia O’Keeffe took a 30-minute walk each morning in the desert; Toni Morrison rose at 5 am, made her coffee, and waited for the sun to appear—or, as she put it, “watched the light come.”
But then she gets to the heart of the transformation power of rituals:
Rather than control, rituals are relational. They create atmosphere. They offer rhythm and containment. Where resolutions depend on willpower—a finite resource, especially in times of illness or uncertainty—rituals build scaffolding. They don’t ask us to muscle through. They anchor us in time, place, and meaning. Rituals are not impressive. That, I’ve come to believe, is one of their chief virtues. They don’t demand overnight transformation. They ask only that we return—to the canvas or the page, to the body, to ourselves—and see what shows up.
My dream for this New Year’s day is to invite all of you to join me on this journey that Suleika Jaouad calls us to begin. A year of pausing. A year of returning.
A year of ritual.
I intend to devote more time in these pages to sharing what I’ve learned in my travels, my studies, my writing. And as I’ve shared, this May I will be publishing my book on this most enriching of life turns, A TIME TO GATHER: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us.
But for now, I’ll share what I discovered to be the first thing that rituals do.
They create a frame. A demarcation. A boundary.
Games have fields, circuses have rings, plays have stages, trials have courtrooms. Rituals, like relationships, need boundaries: fire, water, candles, crystals, ropes, herbs, trees, walls. A threshold that announces to yourself and everyone involved, Outside we were that; inside we are this.
The separation encourages the transformation.
Which brings me to the banana in the Pacific.
I’ve spent the last few weeks with my extended in-law family in Hawaii. At 61 years, I finally achieved my lifelong dream of visiting all 50 states.
As our trip winds down, I’ve been reading Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, a sprawling, intergenerational, intercontinental, inter-caste portrait of a nontraditional family united by a crumbling home in the Himalayas. The book won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In a pivotal, early scene, a young, promising scholar departing India via steamship for Liverpool is given a coconut alongside his Oxford English Dictionary “to be tossed as an offering into the waves, so his journey might be blessed by the gods.”
The boy’s nervous father is worried that his frail son will be too busy—and too uppity—to remember the ritual. As the ship disappears in the mist, the father loses it.
“Throw the coconut!” he shrieked.
This scene struck me as capturing the way so many of us feel the new year’s arrival. Anxious, unsure, anticipating, dreading, all rolled into one. “Nervous-cited,” as my girls used to say when they were younger–a perfect girlish portmanteau of nervous and excited.
In the face of such emotions, making half-hearted promises to do more exercise or eat less sugar seems both vainglorious and puny. What we need to do instead is pledge to do our part to take the walk, make the coffee, issue the call, open the door.
Draw the boundary.
Create the ritual.
Throw the banana.
Perform a small, personal-yet-collective gesture that — if enough of us do separately-yet-in-unison — just might calm the seas of the unsteady journey to come.
🌞
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