What the Space Between Years Teaches Us About Becoming
The emails have slowed to a trickle. The meetings have vanished from your calendar. The to-do list that has governed your days for months suddenly feels irrelevant, almost quaint. You find yourself between years—the old one not quite finished, the new one not yet begun.
And if you’re anything like me, you feel it: a low hum of anxiety beneath the quiet. A restlessness that whispers you should be doing something. Planning something. Becoming something.
I know this feeling intimately. For years, I approached this week as a problem to be solved. A gap to be filled with productivity. I would arrive at December 27th with notebooks ready, planning templates downloaded, goals meticulously drafted. I treated the space between years the way I treated every other span of time—as a resource to be optimized.
It never worked. Not really.
The goals I set in the forced intensity of those final days rarely survived contact with February. The grand plans I drafted while everyone else was resting felt hollow by spring. And each year, I found myself back in the same place, wondering why the person I aspired to become remained stubbornly out of reach.
The Liminal Space
There’s a word for this week that our productivity culture doesn’t use: liminal. From the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It describes the space between—neither here nor there, neither what was nor what will be. Most cultures throughout history have recognized liminal times as sacred. Spaces where the normal rules are suspended. Where transformation becomes possible precisely because the usual structures have fallen away.
The ancient Celtic peoples celebrated Samhain at the threshold between harvest and winter, believing the veil between worlds grew thin. Indigenous traditions across the globe mark solstices and equinoxes as times of passage. Even in secular contexts, we instinctively understand that transitions carry weight—graduation ceremonies, retirement parties, the moment before a wedding when someone stands at the back of the church, about to walk into a new identity.
This week is liminal. The structures that govern our lives—work schedules, school calendars, the rhythm of obligations—have temporarily dissolved. We stand at a threshold, and the culture tells us we must use this sacred pause to… set measurable objectives with key results.
Something is wrong with this picture.
The Trap of Resolution Culture
The pressure begins building around December 26th. Social media floods with prompts: What are your goals for the new year? What’s your word for 2025? What habits will you build? What will you accomplish?
Beneath these questions lies an unspoken message: You are a project to be optimized.
Resolution culture treats human beings as problems awaiting solutions. It assumes that the gap between who we are and who we want to be can be bridged by the right combination of goals, habits, and accountability systems. That transformation is fundamentally a matter of willpower, productivity, and measurement.
I’ve written extensively in The Heart of Influence about why this approach fails. The gap between aspiration and action—between the leader we want to be and the leader we actually are under pressure—cannot be closed through external techniques. You cannot hack your way to character. There are no shortcuts to becoming.
Most resolutions fail because they focus on doing rather than becoming. They treat behavior change as a matter of discipline rather than formation. They assume that if we just try hard enough, long enough, with the right system, we will finally become the person we’ve been striving toward.
But behavior flows from character. Action flows from identity. And identity is formed not through goal-setting but through the slow, patient, often invisible work of becoming.
The Gift Hidden in Unstructured Time
Here’s what took me years to understand: the discomfort of this week is the gift.
When the calendar empties, something surfaces. Without the constant motion of obligations, without the noise of busyness, we are confronted with ourselves. Our restlessness reveals how dependent we’ve become on external structures to define our worth. Our anxiety about “wasting time” exposes how thoroughly we’ve internalized the message that we must constantly produce to matter.
The quiet is uncomfortable precisely because it’s valuable.
In my book, I explore what I call the “hidden years”—the three decades Jesus spent as a carpenter in Nazareth before any public ministry began. Thirty years of ordinary work, family obligations, small-town life. No audience. No platform. No visible impact. Just the slow, invisible work of formation.
We celebrate the three years of public ministry. We rarely consider what those thirty hidden years produced. But Jesus understood something our productivity culture has forgotten: lasting influence is built on a foundation of invisible work. The quality of our public life is determined by the quality of our private preparation.
This week between years offers a taste of the hidden life. A space without audience, without metrics, without the pressure to perform or produce. What if, instead of rushing to fill it with goals and plans, we let it remain what it is? What if we treated it as a threshold—a sacred pause for the kind of work that cannot be scheduled or measured?
The Different Question
Resolution culture asks: What do I want to accomplish?
Character formation asks a different question: Who am I becoming?
The difference is not semantic. It represents two fundamentally different orientations toward growth and change.
Goals are about outcomes. Formation is about identity. Goals can be achieved and checked off. Formation is never complete—it’s a lifelong practice of becoming. Goals ask what you will do. Formation asks who you will be when circumstances strip away your ability to do.
I learned this distinction in the hardest possible way. Early in my career, I was managing a high-stakes project with an inexperienced team member. I had set goals around being a patient, mentoring leader. But when pressure mounted and deadlines compressed, I discovered that my goals had not actually formed me. Under stress, I reverted to impatience, control, frustration. The gap between the leader I aspired to be and the leader I actually was stood exposed.
No amount of goal-setting could close that gap. Only formation could. Only the slow, repeated practice of becoming patient in small moments until patience became instinct rather than effort.
This week doesn’t need to produce a list of goals. It can produce something far more valuable: a moment of honest reckoning with who you are actually becoming, day by day, choice by choice, in the hidden places where no one is watching.
The Permission
So here is what I offer you as this strange, quiet week unfolds:
Permission to rest without guilt. Your worth is not determined by your output. The world will not collapse if you are unproductive for seven days. You are not a machine that must justify its existence through constant production.
Permission to reflect without a framework. You don’t need a template, a journaling prompt, or a structured process to think about your life. Sometimes the most profound insights come when we stop trying to engineer them.
Permission to let this week be unproductive by every metric except the ones that matter most. The metrics that matter cannot be measured: the quality of your presence, the depth of your character, the integrity of your hidden life.
Permission to arrive at the new year without a manifesto. January 1st is an arbitrary date on a human-made calendar. Your transformation is not bound by it. The work of becoming happens on its own timeline, often imperceptibly, always in the ordinary moments rather than the milestone declarations.
The Quiet Work
I spent many years treating this week as wasted time—a frustrating pause between productive seasons. Now I understand it differently. The pause is the work, in a sense. Or rather, it creates space for work that cannot happen when we are constantly moving.
In that space, I notice things I cannot notice when I’m busy. I feel the weight of choices I’ve been avoiding. I hear the quiet call to formation that gets drowned out by the noise of obligation. I remember that my life is not a project to be optimized but a journey of becoming.
This week, I will not draft elaborate plans. I will not set goals with measurable outcomes. I will not pressure myself to emerge on January 1st with a roadmap for self-improvement.
Instead, I will sit with the question that matters: Who am I becoming?
Not who do I want to become—we all have aspirations. But who am I actually becoming, in the daily choices, the hidden moments, the small acts of character or compromise that no one sees? The answer to that question will determine the quality of my life far more than any goal I could set.
The Threshold
This week doesn’t need to produce anything. It doesn’t need a deliverable.
The work of becoming isn’t measured in outcomes—it’s measured in the slow accumulation of character over time. In the repeated practices that shape who we are when no one is watching. In the integrity of our hidden life.
So let the inbox wait. Let the goals wait. Let this strange, quiet week be what it is: a threshold. A space between. A liminal pause where the most important work is simply being present to who you are and who you’re becoming.
The new year will arrive whether you’re ready or not. The calendar will turn. The obligations will resume.
But for now, in this space between years, you have something rare: permission to simply be. To notice. To let the quiet do its work.
The person you become in the hidden years is the person who will emerge when the public life calls.
Spend this week wisely. Which is to say: spend it without measuring it at all.
This reflection emerges from themes explored in The Heart of Influence, the first book in The Legacy Builder Series. The book examines how character formation—the invisible work of becoming—creates the foundation for authentic influence and lasting legacy. Subscribe for more at Blanket Fort Reads.