Thinking About a New Year: Pop culture insights

The start of a new year always has me thinking – about the ups and downs of the past year, and the challenges and opportunities of the coming year. What could I be doing that will make me feel more connected, more productive, more energetic, more grounded?

Maybe it’s just me, but the past couple of new year thresholds have felt rushed and reactive instead of anchored and reflective. Why that is, I can’t say. Maybe the whole world feels too chaotic, maybe it’s just my tiny part of it that seems to be spinning fast. Maybe I can take a little time this year to slow it down.

A few years ago – when we (thankfully) flipped from 2020 to 2021 – I was feeling inspired by Matthew McConaughey’s bestselling book Greenlights. In it, McConaughey writes that, many times, challenges and changes that we perceive as negatives eventually turn into blessings. It’s all, he says, “a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it.” As the book’s name suggests, he writes about “greenlights,” the little signs that show themselves daily, moving us to act. “We sometimes miss the greenlights around us,” he explained on an episode of Jay Shetty’s podcast “On Purpose.” “They’re there. Are we in a place to receive them? Are we in a place to be patient enough to…see why they came to us? Then, are we courageous enough to act on them?”

Which brings us to the flip from 2024 to 2025, when we see the beloved cookbook author Ina Garten’s smile and story seemingly everywhere as she promotes her own bestseller Be Ready When the Luck Happens. And that’s what has me – and so many others – thinking in this moment.

Named a Best Book of the Year many times over, Be Ready When the Luck Happens at first feels like an easy, happy read about the life of America’s favorite warm and ever-engaging cooking show host. In fact, in the midst of election turmoil last fall, a group of friends and I began reading (and listening to) it as our first book on our “only happy things” list. But it’s more than that. It’s a book about careers, and how Ina left a White House job and pivoted 180 degrees when she bought a specialty food store with zero experience. It’s about business, and the ways she likes to negotiate by leaving something on the table, so that everyone feels like they win. And it’s a book about working hard, in order to be prepared for whatever opportunities arise. Even when you have no clue what they might turn out to be.

Ina writes, “Sometimes it’s important to control things, but sometimes the opposite is true – you have to be open and let the universe reveal itself. My favorite example of this is how Steve Jobs reserved a blank space on the iPhone for apps before he had any idea what they would be or how people would use them.” As we begin a new year, I wonder if an extended moment of stillness – something I know I haven’t created for myself in a long time – could set us on the path of noticing the greenlights, as Matthew McConaughey would say, and being ready to take action when they pop up. 

“If I could go back and tell my thirty-year-old self one thing,” Ina writes, “it would be this: it’s those risks you take, and the courage you have to take them, that will be the making of your life.” This is the most recent on the list of many life-lesson quotes I’ve shared with my young-adult daughters, usually to be met with eye rolls. But at any age, can’t we still be making choices that make our lives?

As I visited with a friend about all of these swirling thoughts, and we talked about prepping for a new year, she shared a quote she loves from the 2011 movie New Year’s Eve:

Before we pop the champagne and celebrate the new year…stop and reflect on the year that’s gone by…Remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures, or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt. Because that’s what a new year is all about. Getting another chance, a chance to forgive, to do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about ‘what if,’ and start embracing what will be.

So much to consider, and also to celebrate. Cheers to 2025 and what will be.