Well, 2025 is about to end its run in a few days, and I would venture to say that the number one exhortation to mark that event will be, “it’s about time!” But in reality, it’s one of life’s little conundrums: We start each new year off with hope and mark its ending with an admonition to do better next time. One more year down the drain; next year will be better!
Anybody willing to put money on that?
I’ve written before about time1 being such a precious commodity, and how we tend to throw it away with no concerns over the consequences of such a wasteful act. And though there isn’t anything we can do about what was done in the past, we can certainly talk about what we felt. After all, our feelings are driven by our experiences – real or imagined – and our bodies react accordingly. It’s how nature has kept us from falling off the evolutionary chain for countless millennia. Yet the real question during this time of year isn’t whether or not we’re capable of goodness, but rather why we’re so often inclined to outsource it to the calendar?
Good v. Bad
But this commentary isn’t about your instinctual fight or flight reactions. This is about your habits or behavioral routines. These are the things you do (or react to) when faced with repetitive actions or experiences. These habitual behaviors help to train your brain through trial-and-error activities that happen over time.2 They don’t exactly sit at the pinnacle of your brain’s capabilities, but they’re effective enough. And the issue with these is that once you get into habitual patterns, they’re difficult to stop.
There are, of course, good habits that we can develop over time. Whenever we have a positive experience in the past, it influences our reactions when that experience comes around again. Good habits don’t happen overnight; it takes time and effort for our brain to see the benefits from these long-term actions. And that’s because good habits reward our brains in the long run. Think of them as learning conditions that help organize and catalog reactions to positive experiences or events.
The same does not apply to negative experiences. Bad habits thrive on immediacy; good ones require patience, while the brain remembers the shortcut. Impulsive activities take over reasoning in order to favor compulsive or addictive behaviors.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I’m glad you asked that question. I wanted to make sure that you understood what goes on in your head when exposed to myriad incidences. Because that’s what this is all about: The experiences and feelings you had in 2025, and what effect they will have on you in 2026.
Given where we’re at in the holiday cycle, I’m not going to write about the challenging issues we were exposed to this past year. Taking into consideration the various sources of information out there, the estimated quantity is in the petabytes;3 you can relive those, if you wish. Instead, I wanted to focus on the positive issues that happened. And spoiler alert: Some of them have led to negative experiences.4 And that’s because anxiety tends to reduce your mind’s ability to enjoy the good experiences in your life. Positive experiences in an anxious mind can lead to envy, disappointment, guilt, or fear of loss.
Let’s take this holiday season. Regardless of the various religious undertones for this time of year, this is considered a season of giving; of showing goodwill toward others and aligning our actions with happiness, joy, compassion and love. In 1914 during the season of Christmas in WWI, soldiers from the British, French and German armies that were posted along the Western Front came out of their trenches to meet in No Man’s Land.5 They exchanged gifts, played a rousing game of soccer, and even sang Christmas carols.
But how are we reacting or behaving with one another during this season of peace and giving, 111 years later?
Let me share with you a story:
I have a dear friend of mine (lovingly referred to as Bear) who shared his thoughts about a seemingly innocuous gift-giving event he recently attended. The premise was simple: At this gathering, there was a Christmas tree that had ornamental tags containing the names and ages of children and the gifts they wished to receive from Santa. The aim was to bring a measure of joy to the children of families hard-pressed by financial issues or life’s unforeseen challenges. You go up to the tree, pick out a name, purchase and wrap the gift, then bring it back to the location. Designated “Santas” would then deliver the gifts on Christmas Day.
But as Bear observed how the names were being chosen, he wondered about the act of being blessed. He felt that through his actions, a child in need would be blessed through a gift purchased with love and an honest effort to provide as close a version of the gift the child wanted; a gift that Bear would have wanted when he was the age of the child he was gifting. But what about the people who were donating the gifts? Would they consider themselves to be blessed for doing this kind act? The primary question would be, what was it that brought them to stand in front of that tree? Was it a genuine effort to bring joy to a child, or was it obligation, guilt, or just being caught up in the season with those around you?
For Bear, the answer was clear: His primary reason was to bring as much joy to a child as possible. Bear vividly remembers his childhood, when his family was sometimes unable to give him what he wished for at Christmas. But the enduring memory was that each Christmas was loving and memorable. For Bear, his perspective to life is simple: Approach everything with a passion for doing what you can to provide help or a meaningful experience to someone in need. For him, each act is an opportunity to spread love; these are his blessings.
Take a moment to ask yourself this question: During this year, did you ever consider any act of kindness that you brought about to be a blessing; a benefit or a measure of good fortune to others? Or was it merely transactional; something for yourself or your career? There’s no right or wrong answer; just degrees of goodness and the validity of the applied point of view.
Final Thoughts
So, what’s in your future? Take a moment to reflect on how you acted or reacted to the various experiences, actions or events that took place in or around your life during 2025. I’m not asking you to do a Dickensian retrospective to determine how big the chains are that you’re currently building for the afterlife. What I am asking – what I’m hoping – is that you’ll take this opportunity to assess how much joy you dispensed over the year; how much joy did you receive from a single act of giving, and what did you do to altogether slow down or derail the negative impulses of divisiveness, anger, greed, fear, distrust, abuse or hopelessness? Did your actions build optimism or tear down faith? Did your words foster wisdom and understanding, or did they promote anger, alienation or hate? Did your acts of kindness and assistance rise from a place of compassion, camaraderie and love, or were they mere vehicles for your ego, self-aggrandizement, or opportunistic enthusiasm?
The more honest you are with yourself in answering these questions, the more accurate of a picture you’ll be able to see for 2026. It’s not a cheap mind game or some new-age, human potential synergy hype. It’s a simple matter of determining how you’re wired. It’s whether or not you choose to spend your time building positive experiences or promoting negative ones. It’s up to you to take a few minutes from your revelries to consider whether there is room in your heart for hope, love and a desire to bolster a positive sense of social justice or simply continue to support the narrowing self-absorption that’s quietly becoming the scaffolding for our children’s future.
Life is wonderful, but time is precious. So are the people around you and the world in which you live. You can either choose to build a personal passion for goodness or allow the culmination of humanity’s best gifts to vanish for the sake of enhancing some personal measure of importance. What you end up choosing to do will determine whether you see yourself as adding a measure of hope that could help ensure a brighter future for others or just make this a personal task to forge heavier chains that you plan to carry into the new year and beyond.
- https://beingfrank.blog/2025/12/15/i-dont-have-time/
https://beingfrank.blog/2024/05/11/its-about-time/ ↩︎ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/habitual-behavior ↩︎
- Each one holding about one million gigabytes or one thousand terabytes. ↩︎
- https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/psychology-study-confirms-positive-emotions-fade-faster-negative-emotions ↩︎
- https://www.history.com/articles/christmas-truce-1914-world-war-i-soldier-accounts ↩︎
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