Things to do in 2025

Make friends with trees

Dear Global Jigsaw,

Many of you might remember parts of this post from my New Year listicle at the end of 2023. I am making it an annual ritual, modified slightly every year. I am curious to discover which bits will turn out to be keepers and which bobs will move aside to make way for fresh entrants.

Here is a list of how to make your 2025 a good year:

• Make friends with trees. Go forest bathing.

• Have meetings with yourself on daily walks. Be your own therapist.

• Keep a notebook at hand for found poems. They often pop up to chat in unexpected places

• Cultivate tenderness, including to the soles of your feet.Buy warm socks and moisturizing cream.

• Give others the gift of your vulnerability and receive theirs in turn.

• Make a pot of tea with deliberation. Inhale the steam.

• Cultivate your inner world- tell yourself your own story - think of life’s setbacks as plot.

• Travel your neighbourhood like it were a foreign country. Open yourself to wonder and detail.

• Trust your children. Forgive your parents. Talk up your spouse. Put yourself in everyone’s shoes.

• Find a really dark spot of the world and look up at the Milky Way. Bonus if it’s crispy cold.

• Talk to animals. Listen to their responses.

• Learn how not to kill houseplants.

xxxxxx

Leaving you on this last day of 2024 with words to heed:

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them…. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…”

Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962

xxxx

Happy 2025 from the Arias-Aiyars (the “extra” in this pic is my brother whose visit was the best Christmas gift) to you and yours.

Please add to this list as you will. And do consider becoming a paid subscriber as a way to start off 2025 with good karma :-)