Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
This past year, we set out with the endeavor to make this a better one, come what may. Taking calamity as a catalyzing force for growth, the struggle with it as a means to become stronger. How'd you do?
As happens with resolution, I expect you launched out of the gates with a flurry of inspiration. And I hope that energy sustained you through an unremitting string of successes until this very moment. Though, as sometimes happens with resolution, you may have met with resistance to your intention. Battered by the winds of fate, things perhaps didn't turn out exactly how you'd hoped.
During this formidable act of striving to overcome adversity, you may have uncovered the cruel truth that it is possible to fail in that. We're not guaranteed triumph over hardship. We're not even guaranteed forward motion. We can crash back to the base of the mountain we broke our bodies to climb, and pull an avalanche down with us.
Blanketed in snow, it can seem safer there. You can't fall, so long as you stay buried. And there is a certain icy truth to that. You can grow numb to the cold, and perhaps even find a kind of comfort in the glacial monotony of neverending winter.
Even there in that bleak surrender, an unchanging mausoleum of your pain frozen around you, there is one place a point of light still burns in perennial resistance to the cold. It's inside of you, and goes with you everywhere, even down the blackest hole.
Maybe it's so dim now there's only a trace of heat. But amid the uncertainty inherent in every moment, there is one unyielding truth.
If you dare to climb once more, hand over hand out of your frozen tomb, toward the warm, golden sun melting snowpack into swelling rivers, you'll find the florid explosions of life all the avalanches had eventually watered, flowers blooming like fireworks across a deep green sky, as your thawing heart gently beats again.
And the first step is to hazard the hope, and risk the bitter sting of its shattering. To look for a blade of light through the tiniest fingerhole.
This past year, we set out with the endeavor to make this a better one, come what may. Taking calamity as a catalyzing force for growth, the struggle with it as a means to become stronger. How'd you do?
As happens with resolution, I expect you launched out of the gates with a flurry of inspiration. And I hope that energy sustained you through an unremitting string of successes until this very moment. Though, as sometimes happens with resolution, you may have met with resistance to your intention. Battered by the winds of fate, things perhaps didn't turn out exactly how you'd hoped.
During this formidable act of striving to overcome adversity, you may have uncovered the cruel truth that it is possible to fail in that. We're not guaranteed triumph over hardship. We're not even guaranteed forward motion. We can crash back to the base of the mountain we broke our bodies to climb, and pull an avalanche down with us.
Blanketed in snow, it can seem safer there. You can't fall, so long as you stay buried. And there is a certain icy truth to that. You can grow numb to the cold, and perhaps even find a kind of comfort in the glacial monotony of neverending winter.
Even there in that bleak surrender, an unchanging mausoleum of your pain frozen around you, there is one place a point of light still burns in perennial resistance to the cold. It's inside of you, and goes with you everywhere, even down the blackest hole.
Maybe it's so dim now there's only a trace of heat. But amid the uncertainty inherent in every moment, there is one unyielding truth.
If you dare to climb once more, hand over hand out of your frozen tomb, toward the warm, golden sun melting snowpack into swelling rivers, you'll find the florid explosions of life all the avalanches had eventually watered, flowers blooming like fireworks across a deep green sky, as your thawing heart gently beats again.
And the first step is to hazard the hope, and risk the bitter sting of its shattering. To look for a blade of light through the tiniest fingerhole.
