The New Year - Starting from the Middle of Things

The New Year has such an optimistic fullness to it. It is easy to want to wipe the slate clean and think of all that is possible in the coming twelve months. But as Peter Koestenbaum noted in his Leadership Diamond we must hold the paradox and wholeness of facing reality while we also cast vision because it is true that “we are always in the middle of things.”

You are born in the middle of your parents’ story and you will continue to live that out for some time. As Carl Jung says, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

As this year comes to an end you may be in the middle of an alive and unresolved conflict, a health problem or injury of a loved one without answers, a realization that you are about to lose your job, a decision to leave your organization because the scales between what works and what matters are lopsided. And yet, there is a new year coming and it is already asking you, “Now what?”

Dr. Victor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor gives the imperative: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!" He goes on, “Think about what kind of appeal to our sense of responsibility fundamentally underpins our human existence, what kind of powerful appeal this signifies, allowing us to carefully extract the best possible meaning out of any given situation, trying to actualize the possibility of finding the meaning in any given situation out of this spirit of responsibility…”

“What do I want” turns out to be a very difficult question to answer and “what am I willing to do and what trade offs am I willing to make to get what I want” turns out to be just as difficult.

I hope you will join us on January 31 at our Vision Board day as we come together to begin to answer these questions for 2025 because what poet David Whyte says is also true: “Everything is waiting for you.”