2026, The Year of Showing Up

This year we celebrated New Year’s Eve with a group of lovely friends in the Gers, in that quiet, expansive corner of France where time seems to stretch a little and conversations are allowed to wander without being hurried along. Over good food and long evenings we did what people tend to do at the turn of a year: we talked about resolutions, about goals and bucket lists, about things we still want to do and things we quietly suspect we may never get around to. At some point manifesting came up too, along with affirmations and intentions and the idea that naming the future correctly might somehow help it arrive. Nobody was preaching and nobody was mocking either. It was one of those honest conversations where people are trying to make sense of change rather than perform certainty.

On the long drive back home all of this stayed with me, not in an abstract way but personally. With hours of road ahead and nothing to distract me, I found myself replaying the conversations and measuring them against my own reality, my own goals for 2026, and the uncomfortable gap between knowing what I want to change and consistently doing the things that would actually change it.

Last summer I made a simple change that worked. I started walking a lot, not dramatically and not heroically, just daily, often early, often alone. Over a few months I lost ten kilos, my energy improved noticeably, and my days felt lighter and more spacious. Nothing mystical happened and no insight arrived in a flash of clarity. I just moved more, consistently, and the results followed. Then, over the last two months, life crept back in the way it always does. Work got busy, the weather turned cold and wet, and the daily walks became irregular. My average step count dropped from around twelve thousand to closer to six. Weight loss stalled. Old habits waited patiently in the background, as they always do.

One of my concrete goals for 2026 is to walk the Camino Portugués in May, not as a performance or a challenge to tick off, but as an experience that matters to me. Somewhere between Bordeaux and home it became clear that wanting to walk the Camino and being physically and mentally ready for it are not the same thing. Daily walking needs to return, not as an idea but as a practice, even when it is cold, even when it is wet, even when I do not feel particularly motivated.

The turn of the year has a peculiar power over us. It creates the illusion of a clean slate, a moment when we can step outside our lives and imagine them differently, and this instinct is not foolish because it speaks to a real human need for agency. Psychologists call this the fresh start effect, the tendency for people to pursue change more readily after temporal landmarks like new years, birthdays, or even Mondays. The calendar creates a boundary between the old self and the new, and that boundary, however artificial, can be genuinely useful.

Resolutions are one expression of this instinct, and there is nothing wrong with making them. The problem is that most resolutions are framed as outcomes rather than processes. We resolve to lose weight, to exercise more, to read more, to finally learn that language we have been postponing for years. These are destinations, not routes, and destinations without routes are just wishes. The research is consistent enough to be dull: most resolutions fail, many of them by February, a pattern so predictable it has become a cultural joke.

This is where manifesting fits neatly into the New Year ritual. If resolutions are a tentative claim to agency, manifesting is agency without friction, promising that thought can shape reality directly, that if you align your intentions correctly and believe deeply enough, outcomes will follow with minimal resistance. Stated plainly it sounds absurd, but its appeal is obvious. We are tired and overstimulated, managing more information than any previous generation with nervous systems that evolved for smaller worlds and shorter horizons. The idea that we could improve our lives by wanting things correctly is seductive precisely because it removes the part we find hardest, which is showing up consistently when nothing exciting is happening.

To be fair, there is something real underneath the concept. When you focus on a goal your attention changes. You notice opportunities more easily, persist longer, and tolerate discomfort better. Athletes use visualisation for a reason. Cognitive behavioural therapy rests on the idea that thought patterns shape behaviour. None of this requires the universe to be listening.

The problem starts when this modest psychological truth is inflated into a cosmic principle. Manifesting conflates the real effect of focused attention with a fictional causal power of thought over external reality, and in doing so it sets a trap. When it appears to work, success is attributed to the practice. When it fails, the failure is attributed to insufficient belief or hidden resistance. The idea is never wrong. Outcomes are explained after the fact.

This matters because the trap is not harmless. When manifesting stories succeed, context disappears. The trust fund becomes an abundance mindset. Timing becomes destiny. When manifesting stories fail, the blame turns inward. You were not clear enough. You doubted. You carry limiting beliefs. Anything except the actual constraints and structures shaping the outcome.

Affirmations occupy a similar space, usually with less cosmic ambition. There is a kernel of truth here too, because the stories we tell ourselves shape how we feel and act. But affirmations falter when the gap between the statement and lived reality becomes too wide. Repeating confidence does not create it if everything else in your life contradicts the message. Human beings are embodied and embedded. Changing what you think is often less effective than changing what you do, and changing what you do is often less effective than changing the conditions that make certain behaviours easier or harder.

This is why I have started to think differently about goals and bucket lists. We are encouraged to add endlessly to our imagined lives, more experiences, more achievements, more proof of having lived fully. But the more interesting question may be what to remove. Which goals are genuinely yours, and which were inherited or performed. Every goal that does not truly belong takes up space and creates background pressure. There is a freedom in subtraction that addition cannot provide.

If goals are destinations, systems are routes, and the distinction matters. A goal exists in the future. A system exists in the present. When I walked daily last summer, I did aim to lose ten kilos. I built a routine that worked, and the outcome followed. When the routine eroded, the outcome did too. The lesson was not about discipline but about design.

Environment matters more than willpower. Small changes sustained over time matter more than dramatic gestures. Consistency matters more than intensity. None of this is exciting, but it works.

So where does this leave me, driving home from the Gers with a head full of conversations and a body not yet ready for the Camino.

It leaves me with something simpler and harder than resolutions or manifesting. It leaves me with the need to rebuild a system that survives bad weather and busy days. To design my environment so that walking is easier than not walking. To start small enough that I can sustain it. To trust that consistency will compound even when progress is invisible.

The universe is not listening to my plans for 2026, and that is a relief. Gravity does not negotiate. Biology does not respond to affirmations. Cause still precedes effect. But that indifference is liberating. It frees me from the performance of positivity and from the guilt of not wanting something hard enough.

What remains is quieter and more honest.

Show up. Walk. Adjust when it breaks. Continue.

Real change is built this way, step by step, often in bad weather, and almost never arrives because it was announced confidently at the start of the year.

Here is to 2026.

The year of showing up.