The year is ending. It leaves worn out, like almost everything. It leaves things on the table: tiredness, a good memory or two, others that weigh. Something extraordinary, too. Life tends to be like that.
Things happened. Some we sought out. Others came on their own. And others, hard as it is to admit, we brought about ourselves.
What counts now is something else: how we responded.
What we did when it got difficult, and what we did when it seemed easy. Whether we reacted with fear or anger, whether we managed to pause before responding, whether we faced up to things, whether we apologised, whether we had the judgement to change course or kept pushing simply because we had already started.
We do not control everything that happens. Nor are we innocent bystanders to everything that happens to us. Between the two lies a small but important space: our response.
This is not about taking stock to decide whether we have been “good” or “bad”. It is about looking, without too much ornament, at what we have done with what came our way and with what we ourselves put on the table.
Today there is no need to settle accounts.
A simple and fairly serious question is enough:
How have we responded?
And tomorrow, again.