At the gym, a handwritten sign invited patrons to pick up a felt pen and mark their choice on a whiteboard: 1. Relive 2025. 2. Skip ahead to 2027. Four marks beside the first. Eight beside the second. What struck me was not the count, but the absence of a third option with an invitation to live fully into the year arriving. I left the sign behind and went to the bench press, but the question lingered.

To relive 2025 might mean it was good enough to want again, or unfinished enough to try to set right. To skip ahead suggested faith in a cleaner future, or fatigue with what has already been lived and what is about to arrive. Both choices skip away from the present.

Of the present, I have always liked this late December pause, the hinge of the year when reflection is timely. Not everyone is granted that luxury. Even so, a brief act of remembering can steady the step forward.

I take a moment to witness what the camera delivered in 2025. Photographs returned me to motorcycle rides that became meditations, to yoga rooms that held attention, to people who accompanied me along paths of movement, ancestry, and inquiry. Faces of family and friends appeared, each doing their best. The year was not perfect. None are. But 2025 held its weight in good, and in these waning days of the year, I choose to stay with it and review its remains. It was good enough.

I would not refuse another pass at 2025, but time does not work that way. The only honest choice is the one not offered on the sign: to enter the coming year awake, to make 2026 as livable as possible, to practice understanding, and to build a will for grace, justice, and peace.

I remember a poster once tacked to the door of a house I lived in long ago. It seems a good way to step into the year ahead and live under its sign.

“To understand

is to stand under

which is to look up to

which is a good way to understand”

https://photos.app.goo.gl/FDNj4unMdTZVDY336