When I heard that my tech team is out for a hard-earned vacation next week, I realized I would not be able to send out a video. I thought about what I might do instead. One thing I was reminded of by my husband, who works with a largely unhoused population, is how rough it is on people when during perhaps the most difficult time of year, many support services are closed, so their hard-working staff can have a break and a holiday. So, I knew I wanted to send out something. Thus, you get one more blog in 2026. Admittedly I am a scrooge about most holidays, especially these winter holidays and the way they are observed here. So, it is not as if I am making a great sacrifice. And my head is so full of thoughts, that the blog is almost like that magic writing where the words appear autonomously on the page.
Although I am not fond of how the new year is observed here, I am very interested in all sorts of cycles, so the ending and beginning of the year do have meaning to me. It has been a turbulent time in this world, in so many ways. But thinking about my own cycle this year, it has been a very good year. And when I think about it, the highest of high points is the number of truly wonderful new friends I made this year. Who would have imagined that at the ripening age of 70 I would make more wonderful new friends perhaps than ever? Certainly not that little match girl child of trauma and neglect that was for so long my identity. And it seems that virtually all my new friends, are as passionate about giving something to this world as I am. What a blessing!
Interestingly, yesterday I had a most wonderful gift: a text I received from my sister. My sister has a passionate interest in studying our family history, and is combing wide geographically and long historically, and finding people in places and times that fascinate her. I find it interesting that she has such a profound interest in our diasporic ancestry and relatives, when I have had next to none. I do politely listen when she tells me about people in eras long past…it kind of reminds me of the old days in religious school when we had to read the old-testament and there were long sequences of who begat whom who begat whom. But this text was different. She wrote “I have been reviewing translations of letters from Oma [our grandmother] to Germany. I found this written in 1974…she was comparing you to her father, Robert, who was a lawyer who was deeply committed to social justice. She wrote ‘It may interest you that my second granddaughter [me] here, nineteen years old is studying law. She believes that poor people do not have enough rights. On weekends when other students go on excursions into the beautiful countryside, she visits prisons and gives prisoners advice and practical help. She resembles her great grandfather the most…’”
I was so moved, both that my sister thought to send me that text, but more than that, that my grandmother really saw who I was/am in a way that I did not imagine anyone in my family did. And even though I decided through a series of twists and turns that law was not my direction, the social justice gene that probably went back to my great grandfather Robert, whom I never knew or even knew of, was transmitted through the generations. My heart swelled to feel so seen by both my grandmother and now my sister.
Hope
When I went to hear Angela Davis last week, I went with a new friend. Angela Davis, now 82, is an icon of the Black Power Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s in the US, long before George Floyd was born. She was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and did a stint in prison. She is quite a person. She started out as a philosophy professor at UCLA, and evolved into a militant activist. Like myself, she has aged into a pacifist stance. In those days, we fiercely believed that armed struggle was the only way to change this world. Even though I have to acknowledge in retrospect, that it must have been a false self or some split off part of me, that believed that I could actually tote a firearm and use it. But she definitely walked the walk.
She is a gorgeous 82-year-old, lively, strong and still smart and sharp as a whip. The crowd must have spanned at least four generations. She laughingly said, “I knew I was getting older when after I spoke, people would come up to me and say, “I remember hearing about you from my mother…” and then she began hearing, “I remember hearing about you from my grandmother…” Then of course, she said “now I hear ‘I remember hearing about you from my great grandmother…’” Most importantly however, she stressed, that the work we do today, may not bear its fruit for some time. I think of my newly discovered great grandfather, Robert…What we do now may be for the unborn some four generations hence. Davis continues to be tireless, perhaps in different ways, ever an inspiration to me.
Together
My crazy sleep issues enable me to hear some remarkable programs in what for me are the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps my nervous system lives in the UK or Australia. This morning I heard a most remarkable talk (https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m002nhld) by another brilliant Dutchman: Rutger Bregman, historian and author. He is another one, like many of my new friends, where I wonder in amazement, how can he be so wise and deep-thinking at his young age? Born in 1988 makes him 37. He gave this lecture, of all places at Stanford Business School, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the mecca of technology, just down the road from me where many of the billionaire, even trillionaire moguls were spawned and continue to generate the companies that increasingly dominate our world. I do recommend you listen to it. The lecture is about 30 minutes and the Q and A is the remaining half. He said a number of things that reverberated powerfully for me, most significantly he said we humans think we have prevailed because we are so smart. But actually, the real law of evolution is not survival of the fittest, but “survival of the friendliest.” What enables us to thrive, grow, develop and proliferate, is our ability to co-operate, to work together. What a great reminder. It is so much of what is lost and/or missing in the world of trauma and neglect, so much of what we strive, often agonize to accomplish in Neglect Informed work. We are taking on the archeological layers of history, that make it so challenging to connect.
I had the privilege and the good fortune to have a therapist that could withstand the challenge and the stasis, the generations of trauma that lived fossilized inside me, and insulated me from her, from my great grandfather, from the world of wonderful friends that I did not know how to have for years. And it is not too late!
Bregman, while no luddite, was also concerned about how tech is making us increasingly disconnected. It is “easier” than ever for the self-reliance prone survivor of neglect to stay more siloed than ever, screens being the norm now. Teenagers spend 70% less time in live social time, than in his teen years. He laments, “we search for meaning and find distraction…”
Angela Davis reminds us that we must generate hope! And Ruth Lanius, neuroscience researcher reminds us that hope is a neglect recovery achievement. We require new brain connections to emerge from futurelessness into a world where hope is possible.
The Chinese New Year will be the Year of the Horse. Says Wikipedia: The Year of the Horse signifies freedom, independence, energy, and forward momentum, representing strength, perseverance, and ambition, encouraging bold actions, travel, and pursuit of dreams.
Much to aspire to in the coming year. Let’s do it together.
Happy Holidays!
