In February 2022, 31 year old ‘Nightbirde’ (Jane Marczewski) lost her five year battle with cancer; eight months after using a reality TV platform to advise:

“You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy”.

2022, like all the years before it will leave a trail filled with sadness and joy, challenges and rewards, questions and answers, despair and hope. The learning that tells me these cruelties and gifts would have differently impacted individuals, families, communities, and nations come out of decades riding and observing the roller coaster that is life. Anyway, I continue to see life as a precious journey during which we enhance the chances of happiness if we lean towards Robert Louis Stevenson’s thinking that: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. This is because my processing of this assertion left me realising that most of our worst arrivals are endings of great, hopeful and enjoyable rides.

My 2022 has been a wild combination of lessons, reminders, and experiences that is about to throw into 2023 a spiritually and physically better me which is all the better for being wrapped up in sustained, strengthened and new relationships, as well as fired up by new purposes. Many of you have in ways you might not be aware of input to this offer from the retreating year to the advancing one, but you have, and I sincerely hope we all continue to be each others’ keepers.

With that, and a sincere intention to help or support whenever or wherever I can, I hope we can all take on 2023 with courage and wisdom akin to Nightbirde’s and not wait for life to stop being hard before giving happiness a chance.

Happy New Year…