2023 is upon us – so what to expect.. 

Wise William, a well known Brit futurologist from across the pond, recently sent me an interesting End of Year round robin which got me thinking.

At the end of last year, 2021, he wrote: Technology, the virus, political and economic cycles have conspired to make us prioritise the individual and our individual survival and shared realities. The result is that we cast ‘others’ as enemies distancing ourselves from them and excluding them from our lives.

The truth we will come to learn is the opposite; that it is the inclusion and the invitation of others into our lives that makes us stronger.

We have not yet seen the full extent of the long term and lasting damage that come from prolonged self-absorption, prolonged immersion in social bubbles, prolonged protection of ‘you and yours’, prolonged self-deceit that you are who you pretend to be.

The damage from lost connections and lost social interactions will be profound, especially for those who are experiencing this at critical stages of their development.

Yet how do we best emerge from these tensions and find a bridge to heal the wounds?

We’ll need to learn to re-connect with our capacity to help others. In 2023 we’ll be forced to explore and embrace the power of helping.

We will have to re-learn this truth- getting over our ego- to realise someone else might be willing and able to help us with, our learning anew, the joy and reciprocity we receive when we give help to others more freely.

We should look for those valuable qualities in others recognise them and celebrate them. We should also look for contributions and experiences that we ourselves can offer and not be afraid to celebrate these inner qualities too.

2023 demands that we abandon some ways of thinking (and being) that we are familiar with. It demands that we do different things with our money, our time and our other assets. It demands that we re-negotiate some collectively understood universally accepted truths that no longer serve us.

We might even need to change how we represent ourselves to others and how they see us.
It demands that we shift to different agreements within our relationships with either family, community or our relationship with natural and physical environments.

Change starts in the mind….. 2023 will be the year we all start to get our heads around where we are heading before we orientate our individual lives and lifestyles to that future.

I read these words as I considered the horizon from the Winston churchyard bench and thought; how lucky we are in up here in County Durham to be able to connect as a community each time we descend the delightful path, high above the silvery Tees below, to enter St Andrews Church within which all these issues are so comprehensively dealt with by the centuries of evolving Christianity.

– Mark Samuelson