While New Year's resolutions usually don't stick - people have good intentions that they cannot sustain - it is nevertheless nice that we have divvied our time interpretation up into segments and get this feeling of closure at the end of each year, and with it the sense of a fresh start.

Not only has 2018 been a challenging year for me personally, for the world too it has been quite a perplexing one, making me sometimes wonder if we are retreating in our human consciousness evolution. I thought we were doing quite nicely there, perhaps not as fast as I would like it from an environmental perspective, lagging in other areas too, but all in all improving the human condition generally and slowly it seemed.

I would like to end this year on a positive note, and set an optimistic tone for the next one. "To become more conscious is the greatest gift anyone can give to the world; moreover, in a ripple effect, the gift comes back to its source," David R. Hawkins, who I referred to elsewhere, wrote in his 1995 Power vs. Force: An Anatomy of Consciousness. "And," he continues, "any individual increase also raises to some degree the consciousness of everyone on the planet." It's not so much what others do and think (and getting upset over that), it's what you do and think. "What matters is what calls you, and to do that," Charles Eisenstein said along the same line in June during the The Space Between Stories retreat I attended.

In that spirit I would like to invite you to be just a little bit more You this coming year, becoming more conscious of your emotional needs. When your own emotional needs are more fulfilled and better met, you not only help yourself but everyone around you. It raises us all up a bit. Happy New Year!