6 Ways to Love Your Story in 2026
What do you need in this new year? The story of your life may not be going the way you hoped. Don’t we all need more? More peace, more security, more faith, more gratitude, more strength, more joy. How do we get it?
Here are 6 ways to love your story in 2026…
1. Get New Specs on Your Life
For Christmas this year I got a pair of binoculars. What would I see? I dropped my ever-present phone to focus on a covey of nondescript birds in the surf. I gasped: harlequin ducks in all their striped frippery bobbing and dancing a show! I couldn’t stop watching. Writing does this: lifts strong clear lenses to our eyes and suddenly in that spruce you’ll see a crow’s nest clinging to the spire, you’ll marvel at the sea otter winding himself up in a ribbon of kelp, you’ll see the scar on your mother’s arm for the first time. Your own story blazes amid a dazzling drama of stories all around you and most of us are watching screens instead. Drop your phone, pick up a pen, which is to say, pick up a new lens. Attention will bring wonder every day. Then write it down.
2. Turn the sour sweet
Every time we revisit the past, we have a choice: we can stay stuck in our old stories or we can open our hearts and re-view them, re-vise them, see them again. For most of my life I summed up my difficult relationship with my father by saying, “He never said he loved me.” But I recently discovered an old journal recording my last phone call with him. And he said it, “I love you.” How did I forget? I am re-viewing that last year with my father and 100 other memories as well. It needn’t take an old journal to open your story to the possibility of new truths, new healing. Allender writes, “When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name.”
3. Speak your real story and gather a tribe
I live on an island in Alaska but it can be lonely. So many are living on islands of loneliness and isolation. If we cannot speak who we are, where we have been, the people we have lost, no one will know us. I’m working on new stories right now: a shrike who visits on a day of mourning; losing my dearest friend; when my father said I Love you. Each story I write and share builds a bridge, and they come, one, then another and another until we all look around at one another, smiling asking, “Why did we wait so long?”
4. Swap Stones for Joy
“Write about a time when someone was kind to you,” I direct my students. “Anything: A gift. A kind word, a ride to the hospital, a teacher who cared.” Everyone busily writes, except there is always one who will say, “I can’t think of a single kindness in my life.” How can anyone carry so many stones? I too remember hunger, despair, the weight of neglect. Yes, we can wring blood from those stones but can blood sustain us? In this new year, word by word, we can release those rocks, freeing our hands to find water, food, gratitude. And through gratitude, we soon find joy. As Brother David Stendl-Rast writes, “It's not joy that makes us grateful, it's gratitude that makes us joyful.”
5. Let your own story teach you love
Remember when you were driving with your family and the semi nearly T-boned you? Remember when your son fell and broke his arm, when the fire broke out and all the neighbors came to help? Remember how the lump wasn’t cancer, how you made it through the storm? Yes, your story holds tragedies, but so many rescues, so many angels! How do we account for it? Listen to the truth of your story: You have been saved again and again because you are worth saving.The more of your story you write, the more you will believe how beloved you are and how much you matter.
6. Write yourself younger every year
I ran into an old friend the other day in the hardware store---happy day! But everything was wrong: her catalogue of ills and sins covered every body part and institution I had heard of and some I hadn’t. I left sad. How did she get so old? I have another friend, in his 80’s, who is writing himself younger every day. As am I. Writing in pursuit of compassion and gratitude in our lives opens our fisted hearts, sloughs off the dead skin of cynicism, renews cells of hope. We feel, we weep, we listen to others, we trust, we look for joy. New words birth us new every morning and like this, we shall never grow old.
Would you join us?
