On Whimsy
A year of ignition, clarity, and the courage to stay enchanted.
(Photo by THE MARY CAROLINE RUSSELL)
I get really sentimental at the end of the year.
Because every year, I choose a word. Not as a resolution, not to discipline myself or manufacture growth - but as an invitation.
Some years the word has been grounded.
Some years it has been bold.
This year I chose whimsy.
And I failed.
Not because whimsy didn’t show up - but because it showed up wrong. Or I did. I’m still sorting it out.
+
Expectation is a hilarious and dangerous thing. I had a baby on New Year’s Eve and I had this vision of a year of ease and enchantment. I imagined myself drifting into the season like steam off a pot. Untethered and warm.
But whimsy, I’ve learned, has a sense of humor.
Instead of dissolving, my mind ignited. It didn’t soften into the fog people warned me about. It sharpened. Clarified. In a wild, crackling, holy shit where is this coming from kind of way. An intense clarity that felt almost supernatural. Ideas arriving too fast to hold. A relentless engine working overtime.
This was not the floaty, slow-motion whimsy I ordered.
I’d picked the wrong word, clearly.
It took months before I realized the flaw in my thinking: I had confused whimsy with ease. I thought whimsy needed space, slack, softness. I’d been waiting for an atmosphere I didn’t have.
I’d been measuring whimsy by the wrong metric.
(Flower Installation by Abigail Jane Design)
It hit me one afternoon with the force of something obvious and overdue. This little jolt.
For years, Elements lived in my studio drawers and client notes. A framework I used 1:1, almost instinctively.
Soil for foundation.
Fire for identity.
Air for voice.
Water for impact.
It was how I built brands, how I helped people make sense of their work and their desires.
I never imagined it as an experience.
Which now feels absurd. Why did it take me so long to see it?
All of my creative instincts were reaching toward the same center.
The way food, story, design, hospitality, sensory experience, and strategy weren’t separate, but one long, winding conversation I’d been having for years.
Elements became a place where all of my worlds overlapped. Food as metaphor, story as connective tissue, design as meaning-making, ritual as strategy, sensory experience as brand foundation.
That was whimsy.
Not the feather-light whimsy I thought I was seeking - but the kind born from alignment. In the electric moment when the dots finally connect. The kind that feels like someone turned on the lights inside your own mind.
Once I saw it, I started recognizing its pattern everywhere.
Whimsy wasn’t trying to soften me. It was trying to wake me up. It was threading its way into the edges of my days, showing up in the way my brain insisted on staying deliciously alive even when I was exhausted.
I thought whimsy meant floating through the year untethered and delighted.
But whimsy is aliveness.
Motherhood didn’t shrink my creativity - it cracked it open. It rearranged the ingredients. It gave me a new heat source. My work got sharper. My instincts got louder. My thinking got faster. It isn’t graceful, but it is real.
The word was right all along. I just had to learn its language.
(Workshop photos by Jess Steddom)
So, in my sentimental state, I’m closing out the year draping garland over every unoccupied surface. I’m hanging paper stars anywhere they’ll stick, and perfuming the whole place with oranges and cloves. And then I’m going to throw my baby a New Year’s Eve first birthday party. And it’s all going to be whimsical, damnit.
Not because I found the ease I was looking for this year, but because I found something better.
I found proof that intensity and magic aren’t opposites. That my brain can be both relentless and playful. Proof that motherhood didn’t dilute me — it rewired me. Proof that whimsy isn’t fragile. It’s resilient. It adapts. It survives you changing.
Maybe the word doesn’t just guide the year. Maybe the year teaches you what the word actually means.
It means still believing in magic, and metaphor, and the quiet audacity of making beautiful things while your whole world melts and reshapes around you.
So protect your whimsy. Water your delusion. Feed the little fantasies, the curious thoughts, the wild hunches.
It’s not denial - it’s resistance. The world can push us toward being tired and predictable. Toward shrinking.
Whimsy is the refusal. The soft rebellion of staying playful and a little bit feral even when everything tells you to shut that part of yourself down.
Protect it. Your version of it. Whatever shape it takes.
+
If you’ve felt the nudge to step into your own alignment this year, if you feel that pull - that flicker of your own whimsy waking up - the spring Elements of Brand workshop dates just went live. I’d love to have you at the table.