Happy (new) year

And it’s 2026. Another calendar goes in the garbage, another year we’re eager to leave behind. “Finally 2025 is over”, people say. “This year has to be better, it cannot possibly get worse”, people think. And I smile and think that I’ve kind of lost hope in these self-made rules about fairness and good and bad and suffering, because it’s been a while since the universe seemed to conform to those standards.

And so we get together for midnight and make a toast to “better times”, and turn the imaginary page and think “ok, survival mode is over, now we can start living again”. But in the meantime we’ve had a pandemic, and wars, and wars within wars, and illness and political turmoil, and shootings and murders, and social media and AI and the threat of humanity losing their jobs, their creativity, their connection with others, and possibly their humanity. And one day, we wake up and we look in the mirror and there are gray hairs and wrinkles (or maybe no hair, and new scars), and extra pounds and sagging body parts, and we’ve gained more than pounds, and we’ve lost more than collagen. Because time has kept passing, and it doesn’t distinguish between “normal” and “extraordinary” times, they’re just times, and it’s just time. And while we’ve been waiting for “things to get back to normal” we’ve been losing years, and perhaps, losing life itself.

So I am trying to welcome this 2026 without expectations, but hopefully with the clarity of the fact that these extraordinary times might actually be all we have, and maybe we need to stop waiting for them to pass. Maybe we need to find a way to make them count.

Happy 2026, and l’chaim, to times – however they come.