Not Everything Has to Be New

On familiar routines, losing your way, and remembering how to come home

A few weeks ago, I took my dog on a walk, like I do every morning.

Same leash. Same gate. Same loop around the dirt path while she sniffs, wanders, and does her very important dog business.

When we were up at this beautiful stretch of green lawn overlooking the ocean, a spot she knew well, she was playing with another dog she sees all the time. A familiar dog. A normal morning.

The other dog’s owner and I walked around a small hill, chatting the way you do. I assumed she was near us. But when we came back around, she was gone. Not wandering. Not distracted.

Gone, gone

At first, I wasn’t worried because she’s never wandered out of eyesight before. I called her name. Went to the water station. Called her name some more. Other people started helping me.

Nothing.

That’s when the panic kicked in.

This area is on a college campus surrounded by busy streets. Morning traffic. Commuters. Delivery trucks. The kind of roads you do not want a confused, panicked puppy trying to navigate alone.

I called my husband to come help and started jogging toward home. Calling louder. Asking students if they’d seen her.

My mind raced ahead to worst-case scenarios, as minds tend to do. And then, about the time my husband was walking out our front door to come help me search, she appeared at our gate.

Panting. Shaking. Clearly traumatized.

But alive. Unhurt. Home.

She had run the entire way back—about a fifteen-minute walk—crossing multiple major streets, somehow not getting hit, somehow finding her way through all that noise and chaos.

She was scared. But she knew the route.

Later, once my nervous system calmed down and hers did too, I kept thinking about that part.

She didn’t know where I was. She panicked. She got off course. But she knew the way home because she’d walked it dozens of times before.

That path—boring, repetitive, familiar—was what saved her.

Which brings me to January. This season of new year, new you.
New habits. New systems. New identities.
Reshaping. Refining. Re-doing.

I love a fresh start as much as the next recovering perfectionist. But I also notice how quickly “new” turns into pressure. How easily it becomes a quiet belief that whatever we were doing before must have been wrong—or not enough.

And I want to offer a counterpoint.

Doing the same thing every day isn’t always a problem.
Sometimes it’s a gift and an atomic habit, as James Clear would say.

Sometimes those familiar routines—the morning walk, the journal you keep abandoning and returning to, the way you think on the page—are the very things that help you find your way back when you get lost.

Because we do get lost. We get pulled off course by other people’s expectations. By shiny new tools. By the belief that the next system will finally fix us. And then one day we look up and think, Wait—where did I go? That’s not a failure.

That’s a moment to stop running in new directions and ask a gentler question: What’s the way back?

For me, that question is wrapped up in my word for the year: How can this be easy?

And that’s the heart of the How Can This Be Easy? workshop I’m offering for aspiring writers.

It’s not about becoming a different kind of writer. It’s about finding your way back to the writing you loved before it got tangled up with shoulds and strategies and self-doubt. Back to the part of you that knows the route—even if you’ve been off-leash, off-course, or off-confidence for a while.

You don’t need a brand-new path. You may just need to return to the one that’s already carried you home before.

If that resonates, I’d love to have you join me. It’s January 24, so don’t wait to register. Information and details here.

And if not—let this be your permission slip anyway:

Everything doesn’t have to be new.
Sometimes the bravest thing is finding your way back

P.S. The workshop will be recorded. If you register, you’ll receive the link afterward, even if you can’t attend in person.

P.S.S. Enjoy my other Substack about the dog park (and the great Geico commercial) here.

Originally posted on my Substack.