Outside there is a peculiar silence.
Then it comes to our senses, the awareness of transition.
A few hours ago, the last year ended - 2025!
In the body, the high tempo of the past months still resonates: appointments, social challenges, fears and feelings of powerlessness about the state of our world, parallel demands, being driven, speed, overwhelm, exhaustion. On the inner level, the nervous system is still in a mode of activity and reaction and overstimulated. And at the same time, this day is culturally charged: New Year - a collectively marked threshold moment that also promises a celebratory pause.
Many of us experience a typical simultaneity of different levels of consciousness here:
There is the need for retreat, for relief, for letting be - an inner state that calls for connection and regeneration.
And at the same time, other inner voices are at work: formulating goals, making resolutions, increasing effectiveness, shaping the new year to be 'better' - a drive for performance and optimisation, deeply rooted in our late modern culture.
Both are present. Parallel and unintegrated.
Even before we find our inner calm to truly listen to what stirs in the depths – on the level of meaning, longing, perhaps also of persistent exhaustion – we begin to plan again. As if there were no intermediate space, no empty phase between end and beginning. We usually jump quickly from experiencing to acting, from being to doing.
How strong is our desire for the availability of what we constantly plan, and what value does our ability to control have for us!? How linearly do we think about life – as if it could be planned, optimised, and pre-drawn. This is also part of our previous cultural stage of development: our fixation and our trust in feasibility, progress, and control.
Hartmut Rosa makes a crucial counterpoint here:
"Vitality and real experience arise from the encounter with the unavailable"
he writes. From those spontaneous experiences that cannot be produced through planning.
Resonance, according to Rosa, does not arise from doing more, but from responsive relationships: when something touches us, speaks to us, changes us. And that cannot be forced.
The real question is therefore:
What does it take – in a culture of constant forward motion, measuring, and designing – to truly pause? To not only define new goals but to perceive what truly wants to become?
From an integral perspective, the answer does not begin at the level of strategies, but in the body. There, where we can feel ourselves again. Where pace, tension, and fatigue become perceptible. Where resonance is even possible.
Perhaps these New Year days in 2026 are less a call for realignment than an invitation to integration:
To listen to the various inner voices.
To recognise the cultural influences
and to make space for the unavailable.
Not everything needs to take shape immediately! Some developments begin in silence and in feeling,
and need time!
