Issue 01 · 1 January 2026
On the stillness at the start of things — the year not yet opened, the work not yet begun, and why the quiet before is worth protecting.
The first of January is the only day of the year that belongs to no one.
Every other day is already spoken for. The week has its weight. The inbox has its pressure. The to-do list has its logic, and its logic does not care what day it is. But the first of the year is different. Something in the culture grants us a morning — sometimes a whole day — in which the work has not yet begun and the excuses have not yet arrived. A pause, brief and real, between what was and what will be.
I drew a sleeping puppy once and called it Dreaming Soul.
It is a small piece. The dog is curled inside a spiral of colour — soft loops of movement encircling a body that is absolutely, completely still. The contrast was the point. All that energy, all that swirl, and in the centre of it: rest. Not absence. Not emptiness. A small warm creature that has made its peace with the noise and is simply, deeply, asleep inside it.
I made it in a week when I needed the reminder. And I keep returning to it at the start of every year.
There is a version of ambition that cannot stop. It turns the first of January into a planning session, a strategy document, a list of targets with deadlines already attached. I have been that version of myself. The journal starts on the second of January because the first is already gone — already converted into productivity, already spent.
I do not think that is wrong, exactly. But I think something is lost in it. The stillness at the start of a year is not laziness. It is not wasted time. It is the moment when the mind, given room, will tell you what it actually wants — not what it has been scheduled to want, not what the calendar requires, but the true thing underneath the noise.
The puppy in the spiral is not ignoring the movement around it. It is resting inside it, with full knowledge that the movement is there. That is a different kind of strength from fighting the noise or pretending it doesn't exist. It is the strength of someone who has decided, deliberately, to be still.
From the studio — Dreaming Soul, available as paper, wood, and framed.
Paschar.art begins this year.
Not with a launch campaign. Not with a countdown. With this — a page written at a desk on a quiet morning, before the year has asked anything of me yet. The pieces exist. The collections are built. The work of the next twelve months is to put them into the world, slowly and honestly, in a way I can sustain for longer than a sprint.
That is the whole plan. It does not require the first of January to be anything other than what it is — a morning of stillness before the work begins. The puppy in the spiral already knows this. The rest of it will wait.
The three laws for the quiet before
I. Stillness is not the absence of ambition. It is the source of it.
The mind given room will tell you what it actually wants. Not what it has been scheduled to want — the true thing, the one underneath the noise. The year that begins in stillness begins with better information than the year that begins in urgency. Protect the quiet before. It is doing more work than it looks like.
II. Rest inside the spiral, not outside it.
The movement is not going to stop. The noise is not going to clear. There will be no perfect calm in which to begin — only the decision to be still in the middle of the imperfect one. That is not retreat. It is the deepest kind of readiness: the kind that knows the spiral is there, and rests anyway.
III. The year asks enough. Don't let it start asking before it starts.
January first belongs to no one. Keep it that way as long as you can. Let the plans wait one more morning. Let the list sit. Let the year begin in a breath rather than a sprint — and carry that breath into everything that follows. The work will be better for it. So will you.
Rest inside the spiral. The work begins tomorrow.
— Paschar
Follow the slow build — @paschar.art
Process clips, the desk under the window, layers in progress, and the quiet middle of pieces like this one. One post for every long week at the studio.