A Barbie.
A bike.
A Nancy Drew book.
As a kid, my Christmas wish list rarely veered from the typical wants of a middle-class American grade schooler. I wanted some shiny stuff to play with, and I wanted to read about the escapades of my favorite teen detective solving yet another soft crime.
I am decades away from childhood. Shiny stuff has lost its sway, and the hyper-commercialized holiday blur of the year’s end and the new year’s onset spurs me—and many of us–toward contemplation, moral inventory and an everpresent desire for peace. The things I want now are within a constellation of atmospheric intangibles.
As the calendar rolls around to the clean slate of a new year, here is what I want. For all of us.
- Ideas
I used to think of ideas as things lodged inside me, as if I had been born with a lifetime supply of idea eggs nestled somewhere in my interior caverns. I imagined that If I wanted ideas, I would need to await them or to coax them to rise into my consciousness like spiraling meteorological thermals of warm air.
That’s not the way I see it anymore.
As an artist and a teacher, I have been in the idea business for decades, and I’ve shifted the way I understand them. Now I see ideas as things outside of me but always nearby. I have the agency to catch or attract or invite them in. Filmmaker David Lynch calls ideas beautiful things and likens them to fish. When we want ideas, Lynch says we can go fishing. But we need intention to lure them. “Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook. It can pull them in.”
Musician and songwriter Nick Cave also thinks ideas are out there, awaiting us as dance partners. He says that songs—and the ideas that come to him to create them—are attracted to open, playful and motivated minds. We must be ready to receive.
I prefer what writer Elizabeth Gilbert says about ideas. She sees them as an energy force hovering and swirling around us, waiting to be called, to be combusted. “The only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
Sometimes I think of ideas as radio waves, and I tell myself to turn the knobs on my receiver so all signals can find their way to me. Other times, I see ideas as magnets, alive with force and torque. The south pole of a magnetic idea quivering toward the north pole of my mind.
For 2026 I am gluttonous in my desire for more ideas—good ones, impossible ones, lame ones, nonsensical ones. I would like them to clog my drains and to intoxicate me with their vapors. Too many ideas is the sort of beautiful problem I wish for all us.
- Wonder
Wonder is an antidote to cynicism. The word awe has had the power pummeled out of it through overuse. The closest I can come to what awe used to represent is wonder, an astonishment in the presence of the beautiful, the remarkable, the sublime.
I want more of that. We all need more of that. I think of wonder as an emollient, lubricating the spiritual switchyard where curiosity, discovery and exploration run on their tracks.
I like what neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate Charles Scott Sherrington says about wonder. “We dismiss wonder commonly with childhood. Much later, when life’s pace has slackened, wonder may return. The mind then may find so much inviting wonder, the whole world becomes wonderful. To recapture now and then childhood’s wonder is to secure a driving force for occasional grown-up thoughts.”
- Some Nancy Drew juju
According to Wikipedia, 620 Nancy Drew books have been penned by a collection of ghostwriters since the series began almost 100 years ago. Into my early teens I collected and devoured dozens of Nancy Drew books. Nancy was a role model, not only for me, but for a wide range of badass women including journalist Cokie Roberts and Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Sandra Day O’Connor. Nancy led a squad of friends looking to right wrongs and to uncover injustice. Her character was marked by intelligence, independence, resourcefulness and courage.
My wish is for leaders and leadership—from parents to presidents—that show the same kindness, pluck, decency and moral courage as Nancy.
I wish these things for us all.
