I’ve long been a fan of following strange urges. Not the reckless kind, but the quieter ones—the internal whispers that say, “Try this. Just for a bit.” They start when they start, end when they end, and always come with some odd ritual or practice that feels equally arbitrary and essential. These have become the spark behind what I call my “Years of.” They’re not bound to calendars or resolutions. They begin as a way of training the will—a personal dojo where discipline met curiosity—but over time they evolve into a rhythm of living.
I’ve had a Year of Ridiculousness that involved weekly mirror-staring contests with myself and fifteen-minute standing meditations in specific poses for no practical reason. I’ve quit things I enjoy just to see who I am without them. I’ve repeated mantras every time I saw a bird. The ideas come unbidden, and when they do, I begin. When one ends, I wait. Sometimes the next arrives in days. Sometimes in years. I don’t get to decide.
My current project—the Year of Creativity—wraps in February. Like most of these years, it’s already whispering what wants to come next. But among all these self-imposed experiments, my favorite remains the Year of Silence, which I undertook in 2007. Every Saturday evening, I stopped speaking. I made no sound until 2 p.m. Sunday. The first few weeks were clumsy: apologizing to Mary after slipping up, responding out of habit to the dogs. But after about four weeks, something clicked. The training wheels came off.
What remained was an unexpected sense of freedom. The kind that only shows up when you’re certain you won’t be replying. I started attending a Quaker church to share quiet space with others. Mary, patient and game, would order for both of us when we went out to eat. Occasionally, we’d be mid-lunch when the clock struck two, and I’d speak suddenly—asking for a refill or making a comment—much to the confusion of whatever waiter had just spent the last half hour assuming I was mute.
The silence changed me. It became a companion I hadn’t known I was missing. I began to notice the space between thoughts. The pauses in conversation. The jazz of it all—the rests as important as the notes. It taught me how to listen. In the stillness, I met a kind of self I’d never touched with words. It wasn’t mystical. It wasn’t even that dramatic. But it was true. And once you’ve met that part of yourself, you can’t un-know it.
That’s the strange power of these rituals. They start as a curiosity, a private dare. You think you’re just experimenting. But sometimes, if you’re lucky—or unlucky, depending on your threshold for transformation—you stumble into something that reorders your insides.
That’s why I tell people to listen to that inner voice. The absurd one. The subtle one. The one that once convinced me to sit quietly for entire weekends. The one that says, “You should journal every day” or “Why not meditate on your knees?” or “Hey, what would happen if you hummed every time you crossed a threshold?” It doesn’t have to be big or sacred. It doesn’t even have to make sense. But if it feels charged—like a strange invitation just for you—take it. Try it. Stay with it long enough to get past the part where it feels awkward or performative or pointless. Stay long enough to see if it starts doing something back. Because it will.
These rituals, even the ridiculous ones, shape us. They’re not about self-improvement or optimization. They’re about tuning the will, yes—but also about opening doors to rooms you didn’t know were in your house.
And who knows? Maybe it leads to a Year of Silence. Or a Year of Creativity. Or something even weirder that you don’t have a name for yet. You don’t need a reason to start. You just need to say yes to the whisper.