Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. This year, I’ll give you my brain.

This Christmas, I’m also counting down twelve of my favourite songs to listen to in 2024.

In the build-up to 2025, I’m writing articles inspired by all of my favourite songs to listen to this year. The first piece can be found here:

This one, on the second day of Christmas, is inspired by one of my all-time favourite bands and a masterpiece off their latest, 2024 album. It’s Lightning & Thunder by Marianas Trench.

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INSPIRED BY LIGHTNING & THUNDER

After the most challenging summer of my life, battling severe stress and burnout at the culmination of my job, I left the city lights for the remote lands of La Malbaie, Quebec.

“Does La Malbaie mean ‘the sad bay?’” My mom likely asked at some point over the phone.

Despite all that had just went down and the difficulty of navigating all those tidal waves on my own, I felt completely at peace. I, at the very least, was anything but ‘a sad bae’. I was a very happy bae. A very happy bae indeed. And if La Malbaie does directly translate to the sad bay, it’s certainly a misnomer.

In fact, it was the best two week span of my entire year. It is now one of my favourite places in the world, and somewhere I’ll be eager to visit once more in 2025.

The original intention for starting off my September in La Malbaie was to race Ultra Trail Harricana, one of Canada’s most prestigious events in my sport. The original plan was to stay in Quebec for the majority of the next two months, bouncing between XACT Nutrition events and my final races of the year – Harricana, Bromont, and the ultra-competitive Canadian Mountain Running Championships.

One destructive throughline caused chaos into that plan, and turmoil to my trail running for the remainder of the year. An injury picked up as a result of that stress and burnout toward the end of the summer resulted in racing both Squamish and Harricana injured, and derailed all of my other plans to run at all thereon after.

RELATED: Letting the body heal

After coming to the realization that my year would need to end in September, I, as any writer would, wrote an article called ‘Ending my year in September.’

But despite the title of the sad bae article, the premise of that piece is a La Malbaie styled misnomer. It’s actually representative of the opposite: Starting my year in September. Starting anew. A complete and utter reset.

You see, 2024 was met in three distinct phases. I string together the first two phases in a paid newsletter piece called Be where you are, which speaks to exactly my frame of mind as I lived in La Malbaie. The final phase ever since has been marked by the positive adventures, relationships, and workplace environments that have carried 2024 into being okay in the end, despite this nagging injury.

While the penultimate moment in racing Harricana ultimately ended my year in the sport I love so much, it helped to kickstart everything else good about 2024.

And this is only just the beginning of where life goes from here.

Something in the North Van mist makes me feel completely at peace – truly embodying the Phases of the Moon phrase – “I don’t need to know the ending, anyhow.”

RELATED: I don’t need to know the ending, anyhow

The ‘ending’ to the story, or rather – the enlightened view on where life goes from here, hasn’t taken up an ounce of brain power.

I’ve focused on the massive project ahead of me at work. I’ve tried to forego all of the doubt about this injury. I’ve ‘lived in the present’ more than ever before. I’ve never even questioned what’s next. Other than the races I’m set to do, I haven’t hypothesized about anything happening in 2025.

How’s that, for the ‘what’s next syndrome’ that I wrote about in January of this year?

I could look back on all the big bad bear moments of the year and all the bad that I thought might be a key part of the toy story to how I got here. But really, it’s the more subtly good moments that led me here.

It’s the beginning of this BC journey. It’s the time I spent travelling between Quebec and Halifax. It’s all the fun Aislinn and I have had despite the distance. It feels like we’re always together, even though we’ve been everywhere this Fall and Winter except together (I’ve literally spent time in seven States, and five provinces without her).

It’s all the good that will actually define 2024 when I look back on it all. And while that’s not surprising (psychologically, over time, we forget about the bad and remember the good anyway), it’s something that I wouldn’t have narrated to you two months ago.

It felt like this year took forever to come to a close. And it felt like it took forever to reach this kind of stability. The stability of actually, for once, feeling settled.

And now if I’m going to ride this wave, then I don’t necessarily want this year to come to an end. Actually, there’s still more that I want to accomplish. Maybe for the first time this year, I don’t want to fast forward into 2025.

After all, as Josh Ramsey so wonderfully proposes, a second’s faster than we thought.

And it felt like it took forever
Now this moment’s all we’ve got
So can we just stay awhile?
A second’s faster than we thought.

– Lightning & Thunder, Marianas Trench

I can fully put away what I lost in 2024, especially now that most of it feels like a win. I can now ‘give it my all.’ I can give it my all in the quest to end the year on the highest of high notes within this one last hurrah. This one last show for 2024.

As it were, I had a twist of fate in the dark – the darkness of the first seven months of this year. I came face to face with who I really want to be, and now fate is calling again. Just in a completely different direction.

And many a time, I’ve wondered if this is what is truly the best course of action for me right now, or whether I’d be better off somewhere else. But persistently, fate is calling stronger and harder. Stronger and harder than lightning and thunder. And while it’s very exciting, it’s also very calming. Because, after all, this is only just the beginning.