#97 Noche de Reyes

Happy New Year and Feliz Noche de Reyes!

Tonight, magic fills the air across Spain as children eagerly await the arrival of los Reyes Magos (the Three Kings) bearing their Christmas gifts. According to tradition, the Three Kings—Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthazar—followed a star to Bethlehem, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the baby Jesus. January 6th is the main gift-giving day of the holiday season.

As someone who finds joy in giving and receiving books, my gift to you in this first Plane Thoughts of 2025 is a selection of the most impactful books I’ve read in the last few weeks.

We’re in the midst of the “new year, new me” season, and I imagine many of you are already inundated with goal-setting and personal development advice. With that in mind, I hope these recommendations offer a refreshing departure from the usual fare.

Rather than summarising or distilling key lessons, I’ve shared passages that I found particularly impactful. These excerpts can serve as starting points for reflection and perhaps inspire new ideas for the year ahead.

Maybe you should talk to someone by Lori Gottlieb

But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

Link

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

One thing that wouldn’t change, though, was the importance of intention in love. I saw this clearly when Lucy described how Paul’s death has changed the goals she has for her daughter. Instead of focusing on Cady’s achievements, Lucy hopes for her to have love and connection in her life. This answer stood out, because I hadn’t heard those words talked about as goals before. Goals were things filled out in an annual review at work, or resolutions made on 1st January to achieve more that year (pass a driving test; ask for a pay rise). I had never set a goal to see an old friend four times a year instead of two, or to finally invite the upstairs neighbours down for a drink, or to call my Auntie Julia who I loved speaking to but only ever saw at Christmas. How different life might be, I thought, if we made goals like these, to connect rather than to achieve."

Link

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, and infinium, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrink and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

We only need to be one person.

We only need to feel one existence.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever.

Link

Implementation idea

One simple question to reflect on as you prepare for the year ahead:

Who do you want to be in 2025?

— AJ

Want one of these books? Get 10 people to sign up to Plane Thoughts, reply to this email to let me know, and I’ll ship you the book of your choosing.

On my Christmas tree:

💬 Quote:

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