These past two weeks have been genuinely hectic — business matters piling up on one side, and with year-end approaching, I’ve taken the chance to meet with many friends.
By usual standards, the social gatherings wouldn’t start until January. But this year — well, you know how it is. Everyone is more eager to fire each other up, to lift each other’s spirits.
So yes, between dinners, tea sessions, and drinks, the quiet moments have been fewer. Even so, there’s something I’ve been wanting to share with you.
This is the passage I’ve repeated most at gatherings this year — the one that feels most fitting for this moment, and most capable of giving the heart something to hold onto.
I hope it lands with you.
Whether we’re talking about the march of history or a person’s individual struggle — moving forward is, by its very nature, a painful thing.
For any one person to hit a rough patch every five or six years? Completely normal. For history to cycle through a bitter winter once a decade? Equally normal.
If you intend to move forward at all, these things are simply going to happen.
So yes — as people living inside these historical cycles — it’s fine to grumble, fine to complain. But we cannot stop moving forward. That is not an option.
What we should be doing is continuously refining ourselves as the cycles shift. And we need the steel-cold resolve to cut away the parts of ourselves that have become outdated and obsolete.
Some habits, some beliefs — things we once relied on to get by — were right at the time. But if they no longer fit, they no longer fit. Own it.
Learn to read the sky, the sea, the mountains, the people around you.
Read them. Adjust. Then keep walking, just as before.
Personally, having grown up in a merchant family, I’ve always known: in this lifetime, it’s nearly impossible to eat from the same bowl your whole life.
Constant change, constant adaptation to unexpected complications cropping up from nowhere — that is the normal state of things.
Nothing more to say about it. Grit your teeth, face the wind, and walk forward. That’s the only road any of us have.
Once you’ve decided to move forward, there’s no reason to look back.