Dear Friends,
As we leave 2024 behind, many of us begin 2025 with trepidation or even dread.
From the view down in the weeds, things do indeed look bleak. But when I zoom out to a macroscopic perspective, I see the natural law of karma at work. Not in the punitive sense, but in accordance to the universal law of cause and effect—that individually and collectively, we are all responsible for our choices and actions. In other words, we reap what we sow.
The imbalance and devastation we’re experiencing in the U.S. and globally are the symptoms of our species having lost our way. These include: pervasive mental and physical illness; rapidly increasing climate change and catastrophic occurrences from the incessant irreverence and pillaging of Mother Earth; a society based on the precepts of greed, consumption, isolationism, the individual over the collective, and the dominance of bigotry, fear, disconnection, violence, and immediate gratification at the longer-term cost.
Sadly, as a species, we’ve not yet hit a bottom low enough to change our collective ways. I thought perhaps we had prior to the 2024 election, but the outcome indicated a very different scenario.
But along with the seemingly inevitable difficult and painful darkness that lies ahead, there are also many opportunities. The opportunity to cultivate greater understanding, compassion, and kindness in our individual lives and collectively; to assess and recalibrate our priorities, lifestyle, behaviors, and choices, and to do the hard work of becoming our best selves so we are able to respond to the darkness with as much light, love, and transformative energy as possible.
If you are a personal friend, client or professional colleague, chances are you are a person called upon to be one of the humans tasked with actively engaging in transforming the darkness into light in whatever small or major ways you can.
This is my intention for 2025 and beyond. As a human, I will not do it perfectly. I will continue to lapse into judgement and frustration, and feelings of sadness and anger. But in those times, I will continuously work to regain my focus and equilibrium, and return to a practice of personal accountability, seeking to understand versus to judge, and cultivating an inner garden where love, compassion, and acceptance can grow and flourish in and around me.
My wish for you in 2025 is that you embark on the same journey.
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”
—Desmond Tutu