I wish us kindness and nice things. Kindness and nice things are terribly under-rated.

I wish us health and ease of understanding and necessary acceptance in times of ill health. They will come, for all of us.

I wish us simplicity, especially in times of grief. There will be losses, there will be grief. Simplicity in grief – simply allowing it, simply being it – can help.

I wish us an activism that is not about point-scoring or being ‘better’ at it than others (or being pressured to be activist at all), but about working for all of us, not just our own immediate loved ones, about looking beyond the bubbles that are fortresses, and making dialogue a priority – including (especially) with those we do not understand.

I wish us a clearer understanding of time, that it can work in a sharp line and that we sometimes (often) have to allow that the world is causal – but that time also works in spirals and twists, in infinity loops and dead ends. The knowledge that we carry time with and in us.

I wish us deeper and stronger embodied lives, lives that are felt and lived in the skin and flesh and bones, sinews and muscles, as well as online and on paper, in the heart and the gut as well as the mind.

I wish us paths home when the path is lost and home maybe never existed. I wish us all the possibility of safe harbours in our own times of need and the ability and willing to offer safe harbours to those who are needing.

I wish us the possibility that we can allow pain to exist alongside joy, sadness in the core of hope, pain residing in peace. That we can become better at allowing all of the feelings, not fighting those that are harder work, not holding too tight those that are easier.

I wish us us. A we that allows all of us, in our glorious multiplicity and difference. An us that divides less and includes far more and welcomes the varied and the unusual and the strange.

Happy new year.