The Year Hasn’t Finished Yet

January 1 has never felt like a beginning to me. The calendar turns, but my body lags behind, still oriented toward what hasn’t finished yet. The decorations are still up. The tree is still lit. There are still holidays ahead, not behind.

In our household, which follows both Christian calendars, New Year’s Day sits between two Christmases. We celebrate Christmas on December 25, and again on January 7 — termed Santa Day and Real Christmas by my late husband. As in much of the former Soviet world, the turn of the year itself carries its own weight: secular, communal, held by ritual rather than belief. Gifts belong to New Year’s. The tree stays until after Orthodox Christmas. Nothing is rushed to conclusion.

So in our family, January 1 doesn’t ask for resolutions. It asks for presence. New Year’s is a day that understands alchemy intuitively — not as transformation on demand, but as the slow internal work that happens when something is allowed to remain unfinished.

What Alchemy Actually Is

Alchemy isn’t about turning one thing into another. It’s not a before-and-after story. It’s what happens inside us when we stop trying to move past something and stay long enough to be changed by it.

Most of the time, that change is quiet. It looks like a reaction that arrives a moment later than it used to. A desire that no longer needs defending. A pause where urgency once felt automatic. These shifts are easy to overlook precisely because they don’t announce themselves as progress.

And yet, they’re often the clearest indication that something inside has begun to reorganize.

Closure Isn’t the Same as Completion

What often shows up here is a low-grade restlessness — the sense that something should be wrapped up, accounted for, put away. Not because we’re confused, but because we’ve been conditioned to believe that time only moves forward once meaning has been assigned.

But some changes don’t respond to interpretation. They continue working whether or not we understand them. They settle into the body, the nervous system, the way attention moves — long after the moment itself has passed.

This is another way alchemy operates. Not by asking us to do anything with what we’ve lived, but by allowing what we’ve lived to keep doing its work. The year doesn’t need to be summarized for its effects to continue. What mattered has already entered the system.

There’s a difference between closure and completion. Closure is often cognitive. Completion is physiological. One wants explanation; the other arrives quietly — through changed thresholds, altered tolerances, a different sense of what can and can’t be carried anymore.

The Work That Happens in the Middle

Most of what we’re taught about change skips this middle entirely. We’re encouraged to focus on what we want, or on what we intend to do differently, as if awareness alone were enough to alter the course of things.

But between experience and outcome, something quieter has to happen first.

Alchemy lives there — in the internal shift that makes different choices possible without forcing them. Not a decision, not a declaration, but a reorientation. A change in what feels tolerable. A recalibration of what draws your attention, and what no longer does.

This is why subtle changes matter so much. They’re not dramatic enough to announce themselves as turning points, but they quietly change the angle at which you meet the world. Over time, that angle determines everything.

You don’t need a new plan for this to occur. You don’t need to know what comes next. Often, the only thing that’s required is that something inside you has finished being persuaded.

This is a liminal space — not an in-between that needs to be rushed through, but a threshold that does its work precisely because it isn’t finished yet.

The Smallest Change

When I look back on years that genuinely changed me, it’s rarely because of something I decided all at once. It’s because of a small internal shift that made one path no longer viable — or another suddenly easier to step toward.

A boundary that stopped requiring justification.
A desire that clarified itself simply by staying.
A refusal to keep contorting around something that had already asked too much.

These are not resolutions. They’re thresholds.

They don’t announce a new chapter. They quietly alter the direction of travel.

That’s the kind of alchemy I trust. The kind that doesn’t rush the ending of one year or the beginning of the next. The kind that works underneath the calendar, rearranging what’s possible before anything visibly changes.

If there’s an invitation here, it isn’t to decide what you want from the coming year. It’s to notice what has already shifted — however slightly — and let that be enough to carry you forward.

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