Before the Year Turns

There’s a particular kind of quiet just before a year ends.

Not silence, exactly — more like a pause.

The noise doesn’t stop, the world doesn’t slow down, but there’s a moment when we pretend it might. We sit still long enough to look back, not because everything is clear, but because the turning itself invites the question.

I’m writing this in that space.

You’ll probably remember this evening differently. Or not at all. That’s fine. What matters to me is that, before the year turns, I tried to put a few things in order — not on paper, but in my head — so that when you ask questions later, I’m not answering them for the first time.

This year didn’t arrive with fireworks. It arrived with work. With routines that had to be rebuilt, sometimes from scratch. With days where showing up mattered more than doing things well. I learned — again — that rebuilding is rarely dramatic. It’s repetitive. It’s quiet. It asks for patience when patience feels like a luxury.

There were moments I got things wrong. Not in ways that make good stories, but in small, practical ways. Misjudging time. Overestimating energy. Thinking effort would be enough, when what was needed was attention. The kind that doesn’t rush ahead to the next thing.

Work kept me grounded. Not as an escape, but as a place where cause and effect still make sense. You do something, you see what happens. You adjust. That logic doesn’t solve everything, but it’s comforting to know it still exists somewhere.

When I looked outward this year, the world didn’t make things easier to explain.

There were wars that didn’t end when people got tired of hearing about them. Too many images of places reduced to rubble, lives interrupted in ways no sentence can carry properly. There were attempts at peace that felt fragile, provisional, like someone placing a hand on a door that could swing open again at any moment.

At the same time, everything sped up. New tools, new machines, new promises about what technology might fix — or break — next.

Artificial intelligence became part of everyday conversations, often spoken about with more certainty than understanding. Culture grew louder, faster, more impatient with nuance. Everyone seemed very sure of themselves, very convinced they were right.

Explaining this to you is hard. Not because you wouldn’t understand, but because honesty matters more than having an answer. I don’t want to teach you what to think about the world. I want to show you how to stay curious inside it. How to hold uncertainty without turning it into fear. How to care without becoming numb.

This year, I tried to teach a few things. Some of them worked. Some didn’t.

I tried to teach the value of effort, and learned that rest deserves just as much respect. I tried to teach resilience, and was reminded that asking for help is part of it. I tried to model certainty, and ended up learning that saying “I don’t know” is often the most honest place to stand.

Most of what I learned, I learned alongside you. In car rides. In offhand questions. In moments where your curiosity caught me unprepared and forced me to slow down my answers. You have a way of doing that — of stripping things back to what actually matters, without meaning to.

If there’s something I want you to carry from this year, it’s not optimism. The world doesn’t always earn that.

It’s attentiveness.

To people. To details. To your own doubts.

It’s curiosity, even when answers are uncomfortable or incomplete.

And it’s decency — not the loud kind, not the performative kind, but the quiet habit of treating others as real, complex, and worthy of care.

The year will turn whether we’re ready or not. That part is out of our hands. What we can choose is how we step into whatever comes next. A little slower. A little more awake. A little more honest about what we don’t know.

That’s enough for tonight.

You’ll read this someday, or maybe you won’t. Either way, before the year turned, this is what I wanted to say.

— Dad