I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but on the topic of what we choose to share on the internet or in published life, I think that personal standards and egoes are a pretty interesting topic.

As it goes, I think if you’re going to type something and spend time doing it, ideally it should be the case that every single part of what you type, say, or think should go out – otherwise why did you even come up with it in the first place? Are you crazy???

But the thing is, our standards often stop us – we said that phrasing wrong; we used the wrong word; other people will judge us if we release this in this way!

The thing is, I concede that having high editorial standards is a wonderful thing; we don’t want to create something that would embarrass us; we want our personal ego and feelings to be validated when we create things, much the way that a child wants to perfect a drawing or painting they’re giving their very best work into – and if it doesn’t come out right, we don’t want to show it to the world.

I guess that matters a little less if you’re talented, if you create stuff with sufficiently high quality control by virtue of just breathing, existing, not even really thinking so much – if that were the case, you don’t need to think too much since anything you do will end up amazing… Or do you just feel that it’s amazing but you have no good read on things?

All told, though, I do think it’s actually pretty impressive what you can get away with as a ‘post’ if you just really don’t care who reads what you’re saying and you’re just concerned with what you think about what you created. Regardless of whatever the origin of the behavior is, whether the creator’s talented or untalented, they at least are willing to share themselves out there with the world to be judged whether for good or for bad.

I respect that bravery, and hope to be more like these kinds of people.

Here’s to a year of better flow 🙂

THE SAD THING IS that we are bound by time.

Every single one of you – the reader, the writer, the person just casually scrolling by – all of you are bound in this common experience, only to be reminded of it every single time you lock at the clock – the year itself has all of 31557600 seconds, all of which are passing moment by moment as you sit, breathe, and think about everything that’s happening.

At the end of it, where will you be?

Plenty of us, including me, would have forgotten this – the reflection will be done, we may have moved, started different jobs, Some of us will be alive, some dead, others married; at bottom, all of us will have become quite different people from the people who began on this path of reflection.

I am constantly captivated by the fact that this experience is limited – that we are once-in-a-lifetime phenomena only to take place in the course of these few breaths, only to be gone – and it is a nice reminder to be a little better, to manifest a little more through this beautiful, wild, sometimes chaotic life.

What’s this year going to bring in this limited span of time and what will my human capacities bring out? 

How will we use this time better, more efficiently, recruiting the people around us into something better than we had before?

That’s something to think more deeply about in the days ahead, as we move on with our ambitions, each small step ahead. 

Can you believe it’s the end of the year?

Well, whether you believe it is or not doesn’t matter, cause it is 😀

Here we are, tail end of 2025 and leading into the new horizon that is 2026.

Did you have a fun time?

I did. 🙂

I don’t think a single photo album will capture the totality of everything that took place, but here’s a small sample of them.

In these pictures, a few themes emerge – new experiences, daring, travels, friends from near and far, and friendships from long ago revisited, reconciliation, hope, and a new attitude towards people, life, and those who surround me; there are so many more things that came along the way that haven’t found expression in the pictures and so many other fond memories that I could yap the content of a full book, which incidentally I actually wrote, in bringing out this overflowing chalice of memories.

2025, you were good to me in many unexpected ways; they weren’t always ways that I had expected you to be good; you were a year of striving, challenge, tribulation, but also growth as a human being.

I came into you as a fool, and in a way, I leave a fool as well with slightly more experience of the world, and hopefully just a little bit wiser.

What will 2026 bring? Well, maybe that’s just for later.

Thank you for the memories, and for the greater things to come. 😀