I spent the last three weeks of 2024 in two different countries, far away from the place that I call home. When I returned it was evident that after a year of cultivating the tools of breath and balance there was one more thing I needed to carry in my toolbox—a sense of perspective.
For many of us this past year was filled with incredible highs and devastating lows. I had some successes in my professional life that included launching the initial version of a Google Arts & Culture project focused on America’s Chinatowns, the publication of a review essay in The Public Historian, and the completion of term on the National Council on Public History board.
A wooded area on Havelock Island adjacent to the Radhanagar Beach, view of the Chidiya Tapu Beach, and Me posing on Havelock Island.
On the personal side I watched ten people I care about bring new life into the world, filling my feeds and text chains with photographs of tiny humans. I took my nieces to our first movie together, spent some time with my new hobby of water coloring by painting with my nephew, and found ways to spend quality moments with my friends and family as we gardened, danced at weddings, and experienced new live music. I also built some muscles (IYKYK) while experiencing the wonder of a partial eclipse and the Northern Lights.
But then there were the lows. In the spring I said goodbye to my grandmother, a woman who had prophesied this very moment (with a twinkle in her eye) as I hugged her at the end of my 2023 visit. While small in comparison to the very real horrors facing communities across the globe, it felt like losing a piece of the sun. This deeply personal loss came into stark relief when I walked into her apartment nearly seven months later and saw the empty swing and balcony where she used to sit.
Then there was November, and the slowly growing dread for our future.
Throughout it all I looked for practices that would help me recenter and refocus on what I was capable of doing against the sadness and frustration. I finally attended a Daybreaker event at the Kennedy Center, I got into a rhythm with exercise, I bought myself some fidget rocks after hearing and meditating with the incredible Seema Reza at a Creative Mornings. I looked for light where there was darkness, and found it in friendship and family but also in the quiet of the morning before the expectations of the world creeped in.
In the last days of August, a former colleague turned mindfulness guide took me and a group of friends on a walk through the Tregaron Conservancy in Washington, D.C. It is a practice I had wanted to do for a while and it seemed like the perfect way to mark this particular birthday. For about an hour we walked silently through the woods, stopping when prompted to consider the trees, the sounds, the smells.
At one point Susan had us take our hands and hold them up as if they were a picture frame through which to view the trees, asking us to describe what we saw in that small window before we opened it up to see a wider landscape. It was an exercise in perspective, forcing us to discern between what we saw in the narrow view versus a wider lens. To ask on the flip side, what did we miss when consolidating our view to that fixed point?
In another exercise we closed our eyes for some time closing off one of our senses so we could focus on “seeing” the world through others. At the end of the prescribed period, we open them again examined how our view has changed. What did we see that we did not see before? How has our perception of the world changed?
These questions and these practices are the grounding for my intention in 2025. I’m not going to lie to myself. I know things are going to be hard. It is going to be very easy to fall into a world of outrage, panic, and fear. I will worry. These are feelings I will not be able to turn off.
...this is what comes next 