Friends,
The flood of year-end perspectives, gatherings, memes, and “insights” has arrived again. Their offering? Cutting ties with 2024, moving on without “baggage,” making a bonfire for negative thoughts, saying goodbye to a terrible year.

It is difficult to not sympathize.
2024 has had its share of horrors, first and foremost that continuing slaughter of Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, particularly in Gaza. Beyond the continuous unfolding catastrophe, each day of the year brought its own tensions, depending on your perspective and political allegiances: anti-immigrant violence, multiple seemingly extreme weather events, the empowering of political and corporate figures, housing crises, the rising culture of assassinations and assassination attempts, the organization of chaos in South Korea and Ukraine and Russia and Sudan.

And of course, all of this was on top of, and exacerbating, personal challenges facing each of us. 

We found ourselves struggling to thrive, and also wonder if thriving had a point. A hopelessness snuck in to many people’s lives. In fact, if there is a difference between this year’s fuck-last-year sentiments and that of previous years, it’s that no one seems to think 2025 is going to be easy.

The messaging, taken together, not a healing gesture, but a gesture of retreat.
The message is: Hide in the future.

The image we get is of someone taking a blade to excise the radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip from their neck, so that, bloodied but free, their dark past won’t follow them.

But this excision or forcing-out has consequences. And one of them is an ossification through accretion.

Here’s an exploration of the problem with forcing out from physician and founder of the Paracelsus Clinic Walther Buhler’s brief, potent book, Living with Your Body:
“If the metabolism as a whole becomes sluggish and food is not being processed properly, it is possible that… biliary gravel or even gall stones may develop… Since the body always feels obliged to come to grips with matter, the gall bladder tries to handle this foreign body, which is now a stone by trying to get rid of it; it tries to expel it… but that is not simple to do… its stone gets stuck. At this point the gall bladder becomes exasperated, trying harder and harder until it becomes so over-eager that it is just as obstinately set on its work as the woodcutter whose act gets stuck in the wood…. The organism is paying too much attention to the gall bladder and in the process has become conscious at a point where it is usually asleep. Thus awakening is expressed as pain. In extreme cases, the necessary diversion can be supplied only by administering an anesthetic, which forces the organism to forget the whole situation completely… The gall bladder then releases the stone, just as we let go of a book when we fall asleep while reading.”

Four things to note going into 2025:

1. Forcing-out is different than letting go. When we let go, we are not trying to forcibly expel a problem but rather working on being with our discernment. Letting go is a practice of living into trust and health.

2. Over-attentiveness is often just another name for pain. That pain arises when we are too focused on solving a problem with harsh intervention.

3. Very often, what we think of as a radical intervention is just an extreme act of forcing-out; there’s nothing radical about it. The confusion of “radical” with excessive force arises because the ego is inflamed by feeling.

4. We cannot always deal with our problems by direct action, even if we are awake to the pain they cause. We can, however, strengthen the entirety of our system by attending to it with love.

So… what if cutting ties with a challenging year and its challenges is the wrong move; what if has always been the wrong move?

Since this is a post relating to my upcoming workshop, Navigato, I am tempted to use sailing metaphors. But there are many ways to get stuck in the rocks. Let’s turn from the water to the earth.

Rudolf Steiner once remarked, “A field has to be treated with manure and the manure has to ferment in the soil; similarly, humanity needs the manure of evil in order to attain to the highest holiness.”
Carrying this soil metaphor forward:

What if what we really need is not to flee 2024, but to till it?

Aerating the soil of the past year and its conflicts and disasters allows the new year to grow out of it. If you don’t till the soil, it will harden and become resistant to bearing fruit. You’ll be stuck with plants that mirror the soil you neglected.

“You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?”
– Matthew 7:16

Till the year, sow the seeds, and the year will bear fruits. And you can be sure that 2024 can be very rich soil.

What do you sow? How?

Your vision, now, is the seed.

The vision must serve in three ways – it should offer the light of connection to the world; it should offer the warmth of optimism and purpose to you; and it should offer fluidity to the “soil” of the past, so that the past can be redeemed by this new growth.

Light, warmth, water. The essentials of sowing an seeds.

People try to do the above with New Year’s resolutions. Although there is a general cynicism about resolutions, they’re not a bad move in and of themselves. Creating helpful rhythms and habits is a powerful way to bring together self development and spiritual development. But:

At the turn of the year, and especially on New Year’s Eve, coming up with your vision of the world will strengthen your ability to let go.

Rather than forcing out anything, you’ll be close to what you need to be doing with light, warmth, and fluidity to contribute to your own life and the life of the world and the world of the dead (the past).

Friends: would you like to strengthen your vision as you enter 2025? Would you like to turn the challenges of 2024 into fertile soil for the voyage ahead? 

I’d love to work with you. Let’s meet together in one-on-one conversation and a unique tarot mapping – a card for each month of your 2025 – when you click below to sign up for my upcoming workshop

NAVIGATO: GUIDANCE THROUGH YOUR 2025!
SIGN UP HERE.

I’d love to see you there in the spirit of friendship, speaking, and listening. If you feel called to do it, please do sign up today. More details here.

Conner Habib