Welcome in 2025
Navigating the Unpredictable: A "Weird" New World
As Terrance McKenna so accurately foretold, "I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. People are gonna say what the hell is going on. It's just too nuts."
I like the word weird because it has a neutrality to it and lets us know that things aren't business as usual. It's not necessarily good or bad. It feels very appropriate to our current world.
One could use a lot of different adjectives, many of them dark and more ominous to describe these times, but one of my biggest learnings has been to focus on what I'm focused on. And focusing on the negative does not help matters.
Mindfulness, meditation, mindset work and other self-empowering practices will always have you step back and look at your looking. To listen to your listening. This "meta-perception" is our key to freedom and personal growth. It is our gateway to choice. Our access to agency.
“Reality is created by the mind, we can change our reality by changing our mind.”
—Plato
Choosing Your Reality
To look at our looking, is to be self-reflective, to question our perceptions, interpretations, conclusions. It's constantly reminding ourself that what we think is an interpretation. It's not a fact. It's a conclusion we came to through sense-making and our sense-making creates meaning and the meaning is then taken as a fact. But it's not a fact, it's an interpretation. So what we focus upon makes all the difference in the world to our interpretations and therefore our experiences.
We can choose to focus on the destructive, the pain, the suffering, the loss. And sometimes there is no way around that, we are brought the life lessons that teach us letting go and surrender. But even calling them life lessons is a choice. It's a stance of learning. It comes from a place of trust, that in my suffering there is something greater at play, that learning is at hand. That the suffering serves a greater cause.
Language Shapes Reality
Language is an important part of interpretation and meaning making. Using language that is disempowering or pessimistic is a surefire way to create meaning —and therefore experiences — that are disempowering and dark. Putting a negative slant on people's behavior is a recipe for seeing people negatively. Viewing others with compassion is way to create understanding and connection.
So through language and perception we change our mind and therefore change our reality. And guess what? It's a choice to see it from this perspective or that perspective. Instead of allowing circumstances, our environment, the physical constraints or societal constructs to determine what our mood, attitude or experience will be, we can learn to shape those through our will, speech, attitudes and desires.
“You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”
—Erica Jong
Finding Peace in Everyday Life
I desire peace in my everyday life. I am not in a war zone so this should be simple, right? Well, many people simply commute, work, have relationships and have no peace, because they are constantly at war. This type of war is a choice. We can actually choose to put our sword down.
So as we move into the possibilities of what's to come, I invite you to choose and know that you are choosing. This is an invitation to create your interpretations and to empower yourself by taking responsibility for your experience instead of blaming the people, places or things around us (time, money, society, family). I challenge you to take the bold step of looking within for our happiness, with no need to rely on the external to supply you with what you already have inside.
