For 2026, the word is "Tend"

Over the last three years, I have found a lot of clarity by choosing a single word to guide my focus.

In 2023, it was "Move," a reminder to take action, even when the path felt uncertain.

In 2024, "Reframe" helped me see challenges in a new light and focus on the lessons behind them.

In 2025, “Reduce” helped me let go of what I had outgrown so my energy could move forward with less resistance.

Letting go made me realise something deeper: that effort isn’t required for things to fall apart, only for them to hold together.

There is a principle from physics that I’ve been thinking about a lot: entropy. Put simply, there are far more ways for things to be disordered than ordered. A room left alone will not become clean. A body left unattended will not become strong. A skill left unused does not quietly improve. Disorder is not a failure of effort; it is the default direction of the universe.

Order only appears when energy is deliberately applied in one direction instead of many. Choosing to do something, one thing is already an act of resistance against entropy. It is the imposition of structure on a system that would otherwise drift, fragment, and decay. This is true of work, of relationships, of health, and of thought.

Most suffering, I’ve realised, is not dramatic. It is entropic. It comes from allowing attention to scatter, from letting unresolved things linger, from postponing small acts of care until disorder becomes overwhelming. Life does not fall apart all at once. It slowly loses shape.

This is where the idea of tending matters.

To tend is not to fight entropy aggressively, nor to imagine it can be defeated. It is to accept that disorder is natural and then choose, repeatedly and quietly, to introduce a little order anyway. To clean one surface. To record one lesson. To strengthen one habit. To return to one relationship. Not because it will save everything, but because it keeps something intact.

Entropy explains why consistency matters more than intensity. A single burst of effort cannot hold back disorder for long. Only repeated, modest acts of care can. Tending is the posture of someone who understands this. Someone who no longer expects stability to arrive on its own, but also no longer panics when things drift.

In that sense, Tend is not a poetic word. It is a practical one. It acknowledges how the world actually works. Order is temporary. Attention leaks. Systems decay. And still, it is worth choosing to care not to create perfection, but to preserve coherence.

That is the kind of year I am choosing now. Not one defined by ambition or urgency, but by deliberate acts of order in a universe that naturally prefers chaos.