Today is January 1, 2025. A new beginning; a new year. Yet, we aren’t even a full day into the new year and the hopefulness that often comes with a new year, and already our collective reality has come crashing down. The reality is that humanity is a rocky place filled with pain, violence, and the extraordinarily rich people hell-bent on creating modern-day serfs who worship them.
I woke up to the news of a New Year’s Eve celebration in New Orleans turned tragic. As of this writing, the reports are that a truck plowed into the festivities on Bourbon Street, killing 10 and injuring 30. A shootout ensued between the suspect and the police, with the suspect ending up dead. Mainstream media report that the suspect was 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, who in certain outlets is being described as a former U.S. Army veteran.
Clearly more details will come out, but it is safe to say that 40 people woke up on New Year’s Eve with plans of joyful celebration. Ten of those people had no idea that it would be their last wake-up, and the 30 who were directly harmed will almost certainly never be the same—not to mention the bystanders who witnessed the carnage.
Then, as if the universe wanted to remind us that it has a sense of humor in these macabre times, I came across the news as I was sitting down to write this piece about a Tesla Cybertruck fire at Donald Trump’s Las Vegas property that left one person dead.
In less than 20 days, Trump will once again become the commander and chief of this country, with his new sidekick Elon Musk riding shotgun, looking for ways to create an “efficient” government, while no doubt really looking to enrich their pockets and increase their power. A marriage made in hell for the American people, with almost half of the populace seeing this as a good thing. But it is a thing so bad that I have been listening to former Trump henchman Steve Bannon’s podcast, never imagining a day where a creature like Bannon and I would ever be aligned on anything.
The long-story-short version is that Bannon thinks Musk is a major liability to America and that his real interest in this country is to achieve the goal of becoming a trillionaire at the expense of the people, and that is why Musk is also bringing other tech bros into the presidential fold. Of course, for Trump, it’s all gravy. He gets to avoid jail and still make money.
If the slow-motion collapse of America politically isn’t enough, there is the increasing likelihood that we are quite possibly looking at the start of another pandemic. H5N1, aka the bird flu, is picking up steam across the globe and, like COVID, should this thing explode, we may not be ready. That’s where the real problems start. Unlike when COVID hit, we are now dealing with a population whose overall health isn’t good after repeated COVID exposures. For those of us who were paying attention to COVID before it was declared a problem, the similarities are striking—except in this case, we have decimated our public health system and when Trump gets in office, well, heaven help us. My only advice from what I have been reading is if you are on a farm dealing with farm animals, you need to be wearing PPE—get masked. If you are a regular person, leave dead birds be—don’t touch them; call the authorities. Don’t drink raw milk or raw milk products. If you are a backyard chicken farmer, please protect yourself, and if you are a cat owner, please keep your cats inside. While there are cases of human transmission, they are still sporadic enough that we shouldn’t worry (too much) but cats are susceptible, and the mortality rate for cats that have contracted bird flu is reportedly as high as 67%. Besides keeping the kitties inside, don’t feed them raw milk or raw cat food.
Yeah, this new year is looking in many ways to be an extension of the hellscape of the last several years, which means for most people they are spiraling emotionally and mentally and stuffing it under the bed as they try to be normal. The thing is, normal left the room back in the spring of 2020, and it is safe to say it might never come back—certainly no time soon.
Our world has become a place where pestilence and illness run rampant, our systems are collapsing before our very eyes, our “leaders” are spineless and lack courage and conviction or they are just straight up evil villains. Capitalism is on steroids as it dances to its end stage and the good in the world seems harder to find.
But here is the thing: While this is the background to our lives, we still must live life. Unless we just decide it is too much.
Life happens no matter what our plans or thoughts, and in today’s world we either figure out how to navigate the daily storms or we get swept away and risk losing ourselves. We are inundated with noise and way too much information that is designed to keep us anxious and ineffective, always looking to be saved or for someone more knowledgeable than us to find a solution.
Here’s the thing: No one is coming to save us. We are the change—we are it—we are the forces to fight back and to fight for ourselves, our loved ones, and the greater collective.
I feel your resistance as you read this, as you think, “But I am tired.” Loves, we are all tired. Not one of us is walking through this life problem-free with times when we don’t feel overwhelmed. But if we are going to let this be a portal to something better, we must decide we can do something, even if is a seemingly miniscule action.
We can’t stop the ebbs and flow of life and, in many cases, we can’t even control them. What we can do is manage how we respond. We can manage how much of the external world we allow inside. We can manage our response and our follow-up. In the case of the incoming Trump administration, we can’t stop it, but we can choose how we fight back. Do we throw up our hands and do nothing? Or do we decide that we are going to get involved with local groups and activist efforts? Do we decide to build community with likeminded people and create mutual aid efforts? Do we decide that at least one day a week, we will tap out of social media and be present in our immediate world? Do we still seek love and care despite things looking bleak?
Personally, as I have shared many times, my daily meditation practice has been a gift for me, but for many people meditation feels futile and daunting. Here’s the thing, though: Your meditation practice doesn’t have to look like mine. Set your timer for three minutes and either lay down or sit still and see what comes up. Maybe meditation will never be your jam, but in these dark times, gratitude is a gift that helps us all.
My gratitude practice involves daily journaling with intentions as well as coming up with 10 things I am grateful for every day. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t hard when I first started and there were more than a few times that I was just thankful for electricity and good bowel movements. If you are a perimenopausal woman or been one, you probably know how great it feels to get the internal system to a point where things come out effortlessly.
In fact, I strongly encourage you as this new year begins to start a daily practice of gratitude. Every day think of three things you are grateful for. Gratitude takes us out of that dark spiraling place of heaviness to unearth the joys that do still exist. It’s not about one-upping or anything like that; it just shines some light in the heavy places and lets us hold a little joy. A little joy is all it takes to get grounded enough to move forward in the hard times.
Start small and there’s a chance it will spread. It doesn’t take away from the somber reality of life, but it allows us to hold multiple truths. To be grateful for the good test results and feeling okay while also going “yep, things are a little wacky in the world.” It allows us to hold hope. Which in 2025, I suspect we will all need as we navigate a world facing challenges that many of us never truly imagined. When we read history books and read of those who lived through great atrocities, a thread that defines such people was having hope, whether explicit or implicit. Perhaps even knowing death was inevitable but still writing, the hope that someone would read their words.
It is no longer enough to be socially aware or concerned. Our passivity won’t change the world and the odds are that there is no one great social justice leader coming to rescue us. But if we take our heart, commitment, and our learnings and hold them along with living and create tangible actions, I believe the many can still do a great deal.
I won’t wish you a happy new year but instead I wish you a grounded new year where you find some modicum of joy in your daily rounds, I wish for you to not lose hope and I wish for you to find what you can do and to seek gratitude daily.
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