📻 Plusing
On January’s First Pluses in Northern Minuses
It’s all open now.
Reading suggestion: when a door is slightly open.
🎧 Hear it in Jasmine Monta’s northern Latvian voice ↓
It’s a black winter night, the frost‑dusted trees and bushes shimmering in the glow of street lanterns, and my husband and I are walking home.
The first bus of the morning passes us, drawing a warm line of life through the darkness as it slips by. It’s around 4 a.m., and the New Year has arrived.
2026 — hello!
This year is supposed to be a year of beginnings. A beginning in every moment — because 2+0+2+6=1. Everything starts with one. At least in arithmetic. But how is it in life? Is anything truly new even possible anymore?
Honestly, I have no idea, and maybe that’s exactly why, during a New Year’s Eve party game, I ended up with a new life motto: “I commit to saying YES to new possibilities more often.” Easy to read, easy to imagine — harder to practice, right?
But just a few days later, we’re knocking on the door of a house we’ve never visited before. My husband knows the woman who lives there; she invites us in, offers tea, and we talk.
I forget about future plans — I forget everything — until I suddenly realize we’ve probably spent an unusually long time in this home we’re visiting for the first time, lost in a warm conversation with someone we’ve only just met. This unexpected encounter has opened new angles on my own familiar thoughts and beliefs, and that is exactly what I needed.
I’m grateful.
It seems that the things that happen without a plan, yet along the way, are the things that happen for real. And this first meeting was also a YES to a new possibility — just like in my new motto.
When I’m open to a conversation, I’m not only opening space for another beginning — a door is being opened for me as well.
You don’t think about beginnings.
You live them.
You experience them.
You notice them.
You enjoy them.
A beginning is forever new. It’s felt and present, even while the mind tries to calculate it away or postpone it to another day — ha! I think it’s worth learning not to let yourself be tricked.
After all, every beginning is also a chance to stumble into the next episode of “Say YES to new possibilities,” and that works for me.
Darkness again. Even more snow has fallen. We’re walking home, and just before the turn, an unfamiliar feeling washes over me. “I’m glad to be,” I tell my husband — and that, too, is something new. Not the honor of serving, not the satisfaction of achieving — but the joy of being.
I know the world suffers from a shortage of joy, but the fact that joy isn’t here now doesn’t mean it can’t appear a moment later.
When I’m open to joy, I’m not only opening space for new feelings — those feelings begin to move toward me.
There’s a saying among Latvians, my northern ancestors: “What is given returns to the giver.”
Give to yourself.
Begin with yourself.
Be the One of this year — the one to whom everything else adds up.
Mini Practice
Ask yourself, honestly:
What could add itself to me if I were open?
Let the answer come on its own — quietly, without force.
JASMININE
Photos found on Pexels, shaped by my hand.
Thank you for adding your warmth — it keeps the field alive.