CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

How will you remember 2023?

If years were weighed in scales, if there was a fulcrum of such vast proportions that time itself could be judged, I wonder where we would find 2023.

I am not sure myself. As we start to take our leave of this year I am not sure that I will look back at global events with any fondness. Here, the scales fall to the bad in my view and we must find what we can to correct the balance.

Perhaps it is in the detail that we find compensating ballast, maybe it is what we find in the ordinary of the everyday that, grain by grain, the scales start to equalise. It will take a lot of grain, buckets and buckets, but here lies hope.

I have found in my first year in my new role an overwhelming sense of friendship, camaraderie, loyalty, and support. Perhaps this is where we should find our hope, in the microcosms of our spheres of existence. Perhaps we cannot change the world, but we can change the world that surrounds our every day. If we get on, then maybe we will find consensus, amongst nations, and about climate change, and all the things that seem to have plagued this year and threaten to roll forward to the next.

So that’s my Christmas hope. That as individuals we can find unity, and it might just become a trend on a larger scale in 2024.

Merry Christmas,

Jan van der Velde