What Survived 2025? From Static to Signal.
On surviving 2025, losing anxiety, and the return of wonder.
What a slog of a year this was! I haven’t done a poll or anything but I am willing to bet no one felt 2025 slide through quickly or unscathed.
I started it strong and with a new perspective. Sure I anticipated the new administration to present some unexpected challenges, if I’m being honest I probably expected much MUCH worse for most people.
From maybe Jan 20th till mid July it was chaotic for sure, on that front. Wild new laws (and lawlessness) from those we expect to see order and structure kept the rollercoaster vomit inducing. I bet we have already forgotten most of the more appalling happenings such as:
Spontaneous gutting of USAID programs (Jan–Mar 2025)
Chaotic rollback and narrowing of immigration protections (starting late Jan 2025)
The ending Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA/DEI) programs (Jan 20 and ongoing)
Cuts to Social Safety Net under “One Big Beautiful Bill” (July 4th)
Surprise elimination of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and associated stations
Delulu tariff and trade disruptions (repeatedly changing)
My point is the lived impact for most people, regardless of their profile, was felt to some degree. I can say without any doubt, it was a wild ride in the society overall.
“When the static got quiet, something unexpected happened: anxiety left.”
During it all there was my resilient anxiety ready to bat away any hope for humanity I could stitch together. Which I’m pretty glad was mostly wrong about the worst of it all. Trust me, my imagination has layers of complexity that aren’t available to most.
Somehow the areas I felt most secure started to erode in unexpected ways. Showing up for others was something I always saw I was good at doing. I don’t always do it right, but I will put on my best boots and happy attitude to support another. I will slosh through the challenges I feel I can help someone else tackle. Usually just from a desire to not have someone else feel alone while wrestling with their boggle.
At work I felt turned against and isolated for a misunderstanding or at least a misinterpreted experience between me and my manager. I saw him as green and rather over protective of his illusion of perfection. Our philosophy on work was different and difficult for me to comprehend as I juggled his confused reactions.
I genuinely think he was fighting a different battle than the one I was attending. Mostly because it kept changing, but also because it seldom made any sense. I was at the point of recording EVERYTHING by July 30th, just to maintain what I understood as reality. His story would change and the documentation and recordings kept me stable in what would normally have been an instant burnout in the past.
“What I’ve been calling an awakening is really just turning down the noise.”
Through all the society, employment, and emotional changes, even more personal was happening as well. The “erosion” of secure areas of life wasn’t/isn’t a loss, but more like a clearing of the ground so I could finally see what was important.
I hesitate to put words to my spiritual experiences, because it is complex and personal but my wonderful wife Mandi was evolving with me on some new spiritual experiences.
Now the thing about spiritual isn’t that it is hard, it isn’t. It is the problem of using words I found to be inadequate to what I was witnessing. All the good words are taken by religion, dogma, rituals, and the esoteric ideas. This continues to make it challenging to interpret or investigate for that matter.
I’m a history and philosophy person, so my inclinations lean to the evolution of spiritual matters to be the result of an awakening because of the erosions of society and it’s structure. The world wars, civil wars, catholic crusades, and fall of the Roman empire (to name a few), had very similar spiritual explosions notes. It would seem that some sort of causation or correlation happens during weirder points of history.
I suppose we long to make sense of things and that pushes some people inside themselves while others are ready for battle outside.
To jump into the blunt and less crazy descriptions, I was (am?) beginning to have various uncontrollable clair and psi sense experiences. These are strange for sure, yet familiar, and though it has the opportunity to creating a deeply unsettling interpretation it has instead been wondrous. I am unable to describe any of them as scary or resulting in anxiety. In fact by the end of October my long held companion, Anxiety, left the premises and my roommate Shame followed shortly after.
I referred to most of what surrounds my life right now as “waking up”, but to help paint a picture, I have to step out from behind the safety of vague language. Truthfully I’ve spent months retreating into less descriptive terms because I am afraid of being vulnerable.
I have a genuine desire to hold onto accuracy of my experiences with a skeptical mind that has also held the wonder. But if I use the words that actually fit like clairvoyant, telepathy, or medium it draws up pop culture definitions and assumptions that won’t fit what I would describe. I suppose there is also a valid risk you will assume I am hallucinating (my experiences haven’t dulled my skepticism of others, trust me). A thin line separates me from feeling just as dismissed and trivialized as if I categorized other such stories as “crazy.”
Even now, I lean on Psychology Today for a permission slip, reminding myself that “hallucinating is normal as long as it remains benign".” But the truth is, I don’t see myself capable of hiding the wondrous behind clinical descriptions for much longer anyhow. And whether there is a glitch in the pattern or a indescribable subjective reality, what is happening has replaced all of my anxiety with fascination.
For now, let’s just say that what I’ve been calling “awakening” is more simply put as the process of turning down the mental and sensory noise and static. I learned to meditate, something in the past I found very hard to wrap my head around, became super easy and made obvious sense.
With meditation and learning ways to calm my nervous system, I lowered my “noise floor.” First it began to reduced my anxiety (I sit at an unrecognizable zero most every day now), it made feelings of shame and doubt irrelevant. I can still be startled or spooked, I bet, but all that fear-of-fear itself -- where I was stuck caring about what may happen is gone. It makes time feel squished together (past/now/tomorrow are one happening), but that is perhaps best worked through a different post, on some other day.
Once my body was calm and my head is cleared of any Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt I had that basic recognition, where I’ve noticed that I am aware of my thoughts. If I can watch a thought happen, then I cannot be the thought. I realize I wasn’t the radio station; I am the person listening to it (it seems obvious with this analogy).
This creates a small gap (at first) between a feeling and a reaction. Previously, if I am hungry, triggered, or simply overstimulated I would react far to fast to be in control. But, with the gap to see the trigger coming and choose how to respond, it’s like watching a program run rather than being the program itself.
Unintuitively this relaxation reduces the “fighting” that i would normally have devote to keep my future in the path I had “planned”. I could more easily embody the observing state and experience it fully as Now.
Living and existing within the Now, I am prepared to be amazed. I now notice many synchronicities and wonderments that are poetic and beautiful. Imagine thinking of a friend you lost track of and they reach out even though you moved 4 times and had 6 different phone numbers. Dial that up to 10 and you have “I’m where I’m supposed to be, when I’m supposed to be there.” to the point of hilarious and exciting.
It would be easy to see how this frees up a lot of energy I would have spent on worrying about a future no longer capable of existing. In the Now, there is no place for worry, instead there is a creative inspiration humming all around.
It carries wonder and repeated explosion of, “oh neat, that was unexpected!” That’s how I notice I am living the sublime state of awe.
“I am not a boat. I am the wave.”
I’m not suggesting that my life was full of banality. After all, I am noted by those close to me for often exclaiming “everyone is just out here doing their thing for their reasons, isn’t that crazy?! Just living their version of life.”
We get stuck in our ruts though. Once we get in that groove it becomes a challenge to jump out of it. This rut creates a phenomenon called hedonic adaptation, where the same stimuli becomes invisible to our perception. Therapy can help, or kind friends, that can point to a perspective that can shine a light on the rut and serve up an opportunity to shift and escape.
A book called The Wondering Brain, suggests we can induce wonder by scrambling the self temporarily. Then anything, nay EVERYTHING, becomes a magnificent world within itself. There is an old YouTube clip by Jason Silva about THE experience of awe.
In it he asks, “How do we mess with our perceptual apparatus in order to have the kind of emotional and aesthetic experience from life that we render most meaningful?”
I think this year was my moment of truly understanding this plight. Where my “rhapsodic, ecstatic, bursting forth of awe.” Inspired my perception to exceed the limits I had before and my mental model of the world was forced to change.
I found even more beauty in the mundane, I Now breathe in inspiration and my brain realized itself the conductor of a universe. For 2026 I reach to inspire, create, heal, and share the Rhapsody with you and others.
I know no fear. No duality. The crests and troughs will not trouble me, for I am not a boat. I am the wave.