Sorry, this blog post is not about the popular K-Pop group. However, I am a big fan and when I heard about what inspired their name I could not help but resonate.

I have not posted much in 2023. Part of it is because for much of the year I have been primarily visiting places I have already visited.

However, I am also actively encouraging people to spend less time online as part of a broader initiative, meaning I probably don’t want to be putting too much content for people to read online.

However, this does not mean it hasn’t been an interesting year. The world is in an interesting place. Many people have put the pandemic and much of what the year 2020 was all about behind them. Yet, some are trying to hold onto those themes, while there are still others trying to recreate or recover some aspects of the pre-pandemic world. Simultaneously, organizations and professional groups are talking about how to attract and retain top talent while some large companies are enforcing very top-down return to office mandates. One minute I hear a group of people talking about how wonderful it is that we encounter different types of people everywhere they go. The next, someone is making fun of someone for being different, or reprimanding someone for living by a values system different than theirs.

It feels like everywhere I go I suddenly enter a different energy.

Even within the same organization and sometimes from the very same person I will hear messages that hint at both sides of this strange line. If I could sum up what this year’s been like thus far, maybe it is this photo from Gilpin County on a Friday in April.

At that moment in time, it was probably just shy of 60°F (≈15°C) outside. Yet a significant amount of recent snow still occupied the ground. It was also Friday afternoon, a time many consider a prefaces between the workweek and the weekend. In a way, the people in this community were experiencing both winter and spring and both the workweek and the weekend at the same time.

Over the course of the year, I have encountered communities, been involved in discussions and found places where I feel more at home than I had for a long time.

It’s even come from surprising sources; People I did not expect to have any interest in the things I am interested in. Or places I had previously associated with a completely different set of attitudes.

However, I have also experienced my fair share of the opposite. I’m riding high, then all of a sudden, a very backwards-looking message, typically related to politics, judgements of people around race, gender and age, or an excessive focus on conformity emerges in a place where it was not expected. I was just expecting to have a good time and all of a sudden I am once again exposed to this tired set of perspectives about life and who we are.

So, it’s been 50-50. Maybe I should be thankful for the former 50, that I at least get to spend part of my time in the energy of people trying to move on from the fear-based conditioning of the past. However, it appears to me as if it is now a time for choosing. What do we really want? What do we want to be around? Do we want to live our lives afraid of rejection, ostracism or some form of retaliation for saying the wrong thing, wanting to live a bit differently or doing what we need to do to take care of ourselves? Or do we want to take a little bit of time to try to understand one another so that we can all do what we need to do to live happy lives?

I know what side of this 50-50 divide I want to be on. The only questions are…

1. Is it realistic?
2. How much do I need to nudge others around me to have this kind of energy be the default in my life?