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. 😀

Once upon a time, Descartes articulated a simple and famous philosophy: I think, therefore I am.

His idea was simple: Life is ambiguous, thoughts can be interpreted in wildly different ways; the entirety of the senses can be fooled, turned into illusions, and at the end of the day there is so little that actually can be known in this world that really, all you can say with certainty about who you are and where you come from is nothing, really – but as you think, therefore you exist.

I’ve pondered this insight for a while, and it makes sense to me – but in my life, I feel that a small and slightly less abstract addition applies:

I create, therefore I am.

It’s no secret to a lot of people that I do create, and quite a bit – it shapes my identity, who I am seen as to the world, and a whole range of other things that are inextricably linked to a public persona.

In slightly more practical terms though, creating takes up the time that life is made of, and that time in turn shapes the person you are and who you may become.

Spending hours creating a single video unquestionably shapes your day, for example; how could it not, if it structures how you choose to experience your hours?

Thinking about the content of what you’d like to say unquestionably makes a little part of your brain rewire, reset, refresh, and think about new possibilities; how could it not, if it reshapes the way you think about the world and how you look at it?

People measure life a little differently, even as biology and the archetypes (weird phrasing maybe, but I like that stuff haha) bind us to the common experiences and the life tasks; I create, therefore I am – I define myself by that act of creation, I think of life as a succession of creative experiences, and I create often for hours, always a little faster, a little more meaningfully, and hopefully a little more engagingly.

I create, therefore I am: That seems to be the seed that life has handed me – my nature, my personality, who I am and who I was put to be in this universe. There are so many things that revolve around that central seed, that have evolved around it as it’s geminated – not always in the best possible of ways, and sometimes with some distractions – but it’s continued to go on, moving to that nature.

Different things make us feel alive and in the moment – for me, this is one of them.