How I Make Room for the Year
The first of a three part series marking the transition from 2024 to 2025
In the process of reorganizing and redecorating the house for my son’s arrival, I learned two important lessons about decorating which bloomed into lessons about how to plan for life, and how much can be planned.
The first versions of those lessons were pretty small. First, removing everything from my office made me realize how much bigger the room was than I thought. Second, the way my wife made a bunch of small touches to redecorate completely transformed the room’s vibe and function.
I gave up my home office so that we could make it a “big girl room” for my three-year-old daughter, and we could bring my son home from the hospital into my daughter’s old nursery. Unexpectedly, the hardest part of the whole process was cleaning out my office. It had a big desk in the corner plus a few massive shelves, dozens of boxes, and what seemed like countless piles of papers, pamphlets, small books, and knick-knacks.
With all the crap around my desk, my office had become a kind of museum of daydreams and procrastination. It was an accurate but embarrassing metaphor for my mind: full of ideas for things I thought I should do or wanted to have done, but for various reasons I was too afraid to do many of them, similar to how I was afraid to sort out the detritus and throw a bunch of it away. I had assumed all I needed in my office was a desk, but after stuff started accumulating the vibes became terrible. “Sorting my office” was such a huge block on my to-do list as we prepared for my son, that I eventually had to transfer everything to the garage to sort later, so I could move onto stuff I’d been putting off, like writing about the transition from 2024 to 2025.
For the last two years, I’ve written at least one post summarizing the past year, and one post looking ahead at the next year. I was so behind this year that I took extra precautions so I could focus: I locked my bedroom door (where my “home office” now humbly resides in the corner), turned off my phone, closed all my tabs, put on my favorite “lock in” instrumental focus mix, then opened a blank document.
An hour later, I had two tabs open: the blank document, still blank, and Zillow, the real-estate marketplace. I was browsing the latter, looking at pictures of the house my grandparents lived in for most of my life, taken five years ago when they sold it after my grandmother died. I cannot remember how I got there.
There was something eerie about looking at the photos. I expected nostalgia but it didn’t come at first. They had cleaned and emptied the house. Instead of nostalgia, my first reaction was something more like me talking under my breath, telling myself, "the Louisville real estate market must be going crazy." The house price was appraised 40% higher in 2025 than when it was sold in 2020. But after I sat a bit, I started to think about how the rooms used to look and what we did in them.
At the pictures of the basement, I started to think about how my grandfather had the only Betamax movie player I’d ever seen in my life. They only had one kid’s movie called The Prince of Central Park, which I’ve never seen nor heard referenced anywhere else, and one set of toys, Lincoln Logs, which I’ve also never seen anywhere else. But me and all my cousins have watched that movie and played Lincoln Logs dozens if not hundreds of times.
The picture of one bedroom reminded me of a time my grandmother gave me a small bag of M&M’s when I was about 10 years old. I was supposed to keep it a secret and wait to eat them, but I couldn’t help myself and opened the bag, then tucked it into the waistband of my sweatpants when I realized I had no pockets. When she called my name to come back to the bedroom with her and my six younger cousins, I ran, and on my last stomp the bag flew down my pantleg and hit the floor, crashing open and sending candy rolling on the hardwood floor in every direction. My grandmother quickly gave up telling my smaller cousins to stop crawling all over the floor and eating the candy, and instead gave me an icy look that I should know better. At the end of his life, my grandfather slept in that room, and the attached bathroom had a ramp added for various walkers and wheelchairs.
The bare dining room looked different without my cousins in it for group dinners. The bare living room looked different without my grandfather. When he got Alzheimer’s, he would sit in one chair and guests like me would sit in the other, and we would watch Fiddler on the Roof with Chaim Topol on repeat. He would alternately laugh and cry. In his last months of life, my dad and Aunts would sit around him softly stroking his bald head, and singing his favorite songs to him. After he passed, my grandmother would sit at their small kitchen table a few feet away, often alone, eating an ice cream sundae for lunch or drinking a martini for dinner. She told people she was old enough and had earned these little joys.
The nostalgia was starting to get to me and I remembered I emailed my grandparents a few times. I searched my inbox and found the last long email I wrote to them, while I was living in China around 13 years ago. I realized how prescient it was to my current life. Here’s an edited excerpt:
I’ve been thinking about you and Poppie and the rest of the family a lot lately. I’ve written two or three drafts of long form, handwritten letters I wanted to send to you all but I didn’t get around to sending them so I decided to just send you an email instead.
It’s funny how seemingly unrelated things can come together to form a thread in one’s life along a common theme. Before I left for China my Dad had joined my Mom in the academic endeavor of becoming a local historian. Between a last minute decision to study abroad, a bad case of the nerves during the LSAT and the continued stagnation of the US economy, I saw my pre-ordained career of attorney in Houston morph into a totally unexpected opportunity to become a high school English teacher in southern China. When I got to China I realized China is an unlikely mirror of my own situation: many people I’ve met here have a strong orientation toward tradition and the past but they are highly preoccupied with money and finding the right footing to take the next step forward.[...]
[At that time, between teaching classes and exploring the country, my thoughts frequently turned to identity and origins.] All of it, the new job in China, the foregoing of law school, Chinese culture, my English class and Look Homeward Angel, has really left me spending my free time thinking about where I come from. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about who my family is and where they come from and what that says about me.[...]
Growing up it seemed like I always had something to do besides poke around your basement and look at photos of the Beckers or sit down with my mom and go through old albums of the Dunphies, but now that I’m out and about on the other side of the world I am wishing I had taken advantage of the opportunity to get to know the faces in those black and white pictures a little bit better. Next time I’m in the States I really want to come by Louisville and spend some time with a computer in the basement digitizing the photos and Poppie’s old scrapbooks and talking to you all about who all those people were and where they come from and what they did.
Reading the letter, I remembered that I had a lot of shame and beat myself up over the fact that I didn't cry when either of my grandparents died. I was sad but it just never came. Some part of me was blocked off. I was self-absorbed and afraid, possessed by some nebulous fear of exposure. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter a few years later, I was thinking about the people I wanted my daughter to meet and bawled when I realized that she would never meet either of my grandparents. Getting married and having a daughter did that to me: made me less self-absorbed and less afraid.
I wondered how I’d write my end-of-year posts as letters to my grandparents. They’d be excited about my second baby, proud of me for undergoing double-jaw surgery, and would think I was handsome with my “new” face. My grandmother loved my wife and would say she was glad that my wife loves her new job. And they certainly would have been happy and supportive once I finally at long last got officially diagnosed with ADHD.
I was still unsure how I’d frame my big plans for the year, but thinking about how they’d see it, it became clear. My grandfather was the life of the party. It’s a favorite story that at one of the offices he worked for a while, the women (or at least one important woman) called him “sweet prince.” He was funny and charming and musically gifted. He spent much of his retirement traveling and creating ornate scrapbooks documenting every year of their lives, their travels, and their loved ones. He adored my grandmother and spent a lot of time photographing and drawing her. His vibes, as the kids say, were immaculate. My grandmother was also sweet, but she was very strong and did not suffer fools. She had a lot of compassion but always kept the main thing the main thing.
It was no coincidence that my grandmother loved my wife (and I think my grandfather would have too if he’d met her). My wife is compassionate but does not suffer fools, and she keeps the main thing the main thing. But she is also down to clown and have a good time, and definitely understands what makes for good vibes. I think this is why she was able to use a little bit of paint and small touches of decor to turn my sterile, cluttered, anxiety-inducing office into the perfect bedroom for a three-year-old angel. In the weeks my daughter has been in the room, we have already made a ton of memories of reading books, playing with her toys, and getting her ready for school or bedtime.
After taking the desk out, I realized there was more room for stuff for my daughter than I had anticipated. My wife was able to pick out just the right furniture and just the right decor to give it a great start. The room is still not “finished,” and it is never as clean as we’d like, but getting the big pieces right and creating the right vibes has made it a great bedroom for my daughter.
Thinking through this I realize that there is a lesson in how I am planning my year. Like an empty room in the house, I need to be intentional about the big stuff but make allowances for how life is going to happen. I need to expect that things will get a little messy and not go according to plan. And I think that my grandparents would agree that this is the right energy to bring into 2025: have clear intentions, be disciplined about fostering the right vibes, and leave room for life to happen around me.
Notes, News, and Other Thoughts
Welcome to all the new readers who read my most recent essay!
(Check it out if you haven’t seen it!) If this is your first essay you’re receiving via email, I would recommend checking out some of the “greatest hits” below, to get a feel for the kind of thing I’ll aspire to write and send you regularly:
This was the first of a three-part series on the transition from 2024 to 2025.
In my next issue, I’ll talk about what happened in 2024, then I’ll write about my plans for 2025. I used to write the “what happened” as an Annual Review, but I’ve gotten looser about it in the last year or two. However, I still love reading “best of” lists and other people’s Annual Reviews, as well as people’s posts about the upcoming year and their goals. So please share your own essays along these lines or your favorites from other people in the comments.
Congratulations on taking on such a task. I would still be looking through the papers. And best wishes for the family expansion.
…wonderful remembrance brudder…