🌿 What Will You Carry Forward?
A Prelude to The Human Imperative
The end of each year presents us with the same quiet question: What will you take with you, and what will you leave behind?
The calendar is arbitrary, but the turning of the year still moves something ancient in us. It calls us to inventory – to sift through the year’s weight and wonder and decide what deserves another season of our care.
We rarely pause long enough to notice how much we’ve gathered. Expectations. Disappointments. Habits of thought that no longer fit. But before we rush ahead, the soul needs to travel lightly.
🌿 The Art of Release
Not everything you carried through this year belongs to the next one.
Let that be a mercy, not a loss.
Release the noise that dulled your instincts. Release the cynicism that masqueraded as wisdom. Release the guilt for all the things you couldn’t fix, and the perfectionism that told you that you should have fixed them. Release the habits that don’t serve you. Release the beliefs that, once challenged, prove not to have belonged to you in the first place.
You cannot build a new world while dragging the wreckage of the old one behind you. Let go to move closer to authenticity. Letting go honours the lessons of the past, using them as the foundation for what’s next. Leverage what’s left behind as treads on the staircase leading you towards a more authentic life. The act of letting go is not abandonment – it’s reverence for what the past has already taught.
🌿 The Courage to Keep
Not everything should be released. Some things – hard-earned truths, glimpses of grace – deserve protection.
Carry forward what steadied you:
the people who stayed when things got hard,
the habits that restored your clarity,
the small acts of goodness that reminded you humanity still works.
the strong sense of renewed self – emerging from the fog of life.
Carry forward your capacity to care. Carry forward your faith that kindness still counts. Carry forward your hope – even if it flickers. Carry forward the determination to defend the integrity of the world you wish to live in. For what we don’t defend can easily be taken.
These are the seeds that will take root when the ground thaws again.
🌿 The Discipline of Beginning Again
A new year is not a blank slate. It’s a continuation – another chance to live more aligned with your values. The past year is not one to be remembered with regret or guilt or fear, but rather one that becomes the foundation of the one you will build in the year ahead. Use the lessons of the past year to create new habits, opportunities, and intentions.
Begin again not by reinventing yourself, but by remembering yourself – the part that still believes in beauty, decency, and courage.
The part that knows: the future is not something we predict. It is something we practice.
🌿 The Invitation
Next week, The Human Imperative begins – a year-long exploration of what it means to live with integrity and hope in an age that keeps lowering the bar. I invite you to join this journey, to explore with intention and community how we can carry forward what matters most.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve already said yes – quietly, inwardly – to being part of this renewal. I hope you will actively take part in The Human Imperative as we move forward together. The light is always stronger when we gather together.
May this next year find you both softer and stronger, more awake and more at peace.
🌿 What we choose to carry forward shapes the world we create.
© 2025 Kimberly Laceby-Gray
All Rights Reserved.