Looking Back and Moving Forward: Embodying Gentle Change in 2025
As I look forward to the new year, here are three things I’m thinking about:
The past three years have been awe-inducing for me.
In that timespan, I have…
Gotten engaged to my wonderful partner at Mount Rainier
Published my first book, Unmasking the Inner Critic: Lessons for Living an Unconstricted Life
Continued my day-job supporting and training public school teachers
Watched my kiddos get older, begin school, and start playing baseball
Walked the Camino de Santiago with my dad
Moved across Tacoma to a new house and neighborhood
and…spent the past two years writing my weekly newsletter, The Wednesday 1-2-3.
Obviously a lot more has happened, but needless to say: wow. A lot can change in three years.
🧰 Resource #1: If you didn’t manage to do any year-end reflection or planning, I highly recommend checking out my friend James’ 2024 Reflection Poem Guide. I’m usually pretty averse to “end of year reflection strategies,” but this is a beautiful and very different kind of process.
🧰 Resource #2: One of the folks I follow, Anne-Laure Le Cunff has this wonderful (and in-depth) guide for completing what she calls an “annual review.” If you’re interested, I highly recommend finding 30-60 minutes and using it to look back on your 2024.
This is going to be a year for action.
In just under three weeks, Donald Trump will once again be President of the United States.
I could write paragraphs and pages on what I think is coming and how I hope we as a country will meet the moment, but I’ll summarize it with two hope-filled guiding statements for me:
We, as individuals and communities, can hold the charge of this moment.
We can be gentle while “sending the teeth” where they are meant to go.
In the face of fascism, I believe we can metabolize our fear and our stuckness and our anger into tangible acts of community care and fierce love. We can’t do it alone – but within the context of community and with an embodied commitment to justice, we have what we need to move with healing and repair.
🧰 Resource #3: I’ve shared this a few times, but here’s a 25-minute mini-workshop I recorded on how we can hold the charge of this moment. It includes: a bit about how our nervous systems work, why our “window of tolerance” is helpful to understand, and several practices for us to build our capacity for resilience.
Which brings me to the third thing I’m thinking a ton about right now…
I want to embody gentle change.
Gentle in the way I hold people’s stories and my idea of what the outcome of change “should be.” Fierce in the way I commit myself to healing and solidarity.
For much of my adult life, I’ve engaged intellectually with the national dialogue while acquiescing to other people’s comforts and staying silent-ish in my own communities. Sure, people have known where I stand – but, in general, I’ve shied away from engaging in conversations or actions that would feel uncomfortable (and actually open the door to new possibilities.)
And this has led to an emerging tension within me – between who I’m showing up as and the person I feel invited to become.
So this past year, I began to intentionally reclaim my own story of growing up with activism in the household, my work with asset-based community development, my experience on multiple political campaigns in Seattle, and my day-job pushing our local education system toward anti-racist and student-centered teaching strategies.
I don’t see myself as a “knock-on-doors, grab-the-bullhorn” type of activist, although I’ve done both (and both are necessary.)
I see myself as someone embodying gentle change right here in the midst of my communities, learning to more honestly address harm and work for healing, while centering others’ (and my own) inherent dignity in the process.
❓ Questions
What are three values you would like to embody in 2025?
As you look into 2025, what are you preparing to do that’s different from in 2024?
