The Year That Waits For Us
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There is a moment,
just before the world turns its page,
when time feels suspended—
a held breath,
a soft hush across the calendar
as if the universe itself
is listening.
We like to believe a new year arrives
in a single bright flash,
a clean break from everything
that came before.
But beginnings,
like most miracles,
are quieter than that.
They unfurl slowly,
like light creeping across the floor
at dawn—
noticed only when we look back
and see the room
has changed.
Hope is not a guarantee;
it is a discipline.
A choice we make
even when the world feels heavy,
even when the past sits beside us
with familiar weight.
Hope asks us to believe
that what fractured can mend,
that what we lost can be replaced
with something gentler,
that becoming is still possible
no matter how many times
we have come undone.
And perhaps the secret—
the one the new year whispers
to anyone quiet enough to hear—is this:
The life you want
does not begin later.
It begins now,
in the small recalibrations,
in the shift of your gaze
toward the horizon instead of the wound,
in the trembling but deliberate act
of imagining yourself
into something truer.
The year ahead
is not asking you to be fearless.
It is asking you to be willing—
to take one step,
and then another,
toward a future that is still forming
and still forgiving.
Because there are versions of you
waiting on the other side
of every brave decision
you haven’t made yet.
There is tenderness you have not felt,
joy you have not tasted,
love you have not even learned
how to receive.
There are moments approaching
that will shift the entire architecture
of your heart
in ways you cannot yet imagine.
And the most hopeful truth
the new year carries
is that nothing—
not grief,
not fear,
not the heaviness of the months behind you—
has the final word.
You do.
So step gently
into the year that waits for you.
Not because it will be easy,
and not because you are unbreakable,
but because you are still here—
wiser for the storms,
softer for the scars,
and open, at last,
to the possibility
that the best parts of your story
are not behind you
but beautifully, patiently
ahead.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
