Seismic shifts: Navigating the uncharted territory of 2026

I took a month off last month because it felt like a very intense mixed energy was happening and I needed to percolate some things. I’m guessing I am not alone, and it is most definitely not over! 

What’s become clear to me is that while we go through this huge period of transition (which feels like it is going to last for some time) we really need to be careful about what we focus on. 

Covid asked us to somehow process a shared experience of isolation and freeze, and just as we have been working to reopen ourselves to a newer version of the world and way of being, we are faced with an even fresher, more explicit and unpredictable wave of major upheaval. 

Alongside these global events, there is also our personal context. For example - I find myself examining life through the lenses of being a middle aged woman, increasingly a parent to my living parent, attempting to understand what AI might mean for us as humans, and then as career professionals, and ever aware of the brevity of life after losing a very beloved 42 year old client of mine this time last year.

Loss Deconstructs

Global loss brings to an end many long term relationships - with people, things, situations, and even beliefs. Changes in resources, perceived safety and stress levels can impact all kinds of relationships: romantic ones, working ones, family ones, and the less tangible ones. The loss of the rhythmic touchpoints that form our relationships with places, spaces and objects. The end of whole swathes of assumptions that formed the fabric of our decision making.

Like an athlete with a sudden injury, we can find ourselves at a loss when facing unexpected restrictions in our freedom - a rift in our identity, a depletion of the energy and agency we had enjoyed before. Lockdown was the end of a long term relationship with life as we had known it. Now we are facing the end of long term relationships with institutions, processes, and assumptions that run even deeper.

Entropy - the gradual decline into disorder

In living systems, life makes room for newness via deconstruction. Stuckness starts to move, fixed becomes fluid, tightness softens. We live in a society that mostly refuses to accept the emotional labour required to move through the deconstructive phases - ageing, loss and decay. We fight against getting older, denying ourselves the fullness of our maturity. We push pain away, often until our body forces our hand. Our rejection of entropy is one (big) reason that what is happening right now feels so overwhelmingly challenging, dangerous and heartbreaking. Even though it is exactly that same process that is creating openings for other ways of thinking and being. 

The breakdown of the old has to come before a new pattern can form. It is this in-between, transitionary phase that can feel so difficult for us certainty hunters. And yet we live this process of change and reorganisation both internally and externally every second of the day. What feels different right now is the speed at which it is happening - and that is both new, and powerful. While the news spreads fear, I choose to also see greater opportunities for reconnection with our humanity, collaboration, community and nature.

Syntropy - the natural tendency of living systems to move towards order and coherence

We adapt and grow. We let go and create space for the new. This offers a constant enrichment of our experience - new perspectives, new connections, new ways of living.

We almost always gain a stronger, more present appreciation for the fragility and delicacy of our lives, and for the unseen, underappreciated truth of things. The invisible, essential underpinnings of our society. Those volunteering on the frontline. People helping people. People caring for people. Our connection with the natural world. The feeling in our bodies of being around the people we love. As we mature and make better sense of our inner world, deeper coherence starts to take hold.

Spring Cleaning

Where we believe we know the lie of the land - a person, a situation, inside and out - change or loss can cause a seismic rupture in the fabric of the reality we have been building over the years. Some parts of us will carry a time travelling desire to put everything back the way it was, even though we have changed beyond who we were back then.

When we begin to bravely step away from the fantasy of the time machine, we can start to separate out the strands. Like zooming out of a close-up image, we begin to see the surrounding landscape. Doors we had not noticed before. A bench we had been painting over in the hopes it would not break - we can now see is beyond repair.

In our capitalist society it is so easy to become a metaphorical hoarder - collecting but never letting go. The more we carry, the less we can value or make sense of the load, and the less we can flex and pivot when it really matters.

Now is the time to let go of whatever is not serving you. Whether that is a belief, a person, a context, a structure, a habit - anything that does not serve.

Just like the delicious hormonal cocktail we are handed when falling in love, we can experience an equally powerful opening of the heart and mind when loss breaks us open. Let us make new choices, try new things, reset our baselines, shake out the sheets of our old inner world and hang them up in the sunshine. 

Some Practical and Magical questions:

What is now not possible? What is now possible? 

What has gone? What is remaining? 

What is hanging, suspended, undecided? What has been freed? 

What has been closed? What has been opened?

What are our options? 

What is our response? 

As you sit with those questions, you may also notice a cautious energy - bound up in tight ropes of risk calculation. Is it safe to step out into a new view? Are things settled enough to have a new opinion, or form a new commitment?

Everything has its own timeline. Allowing the timeline to be what it is is a good thing, often judged as a bad thing. Speed is an experience, not a measure. And for those parts of us that are a mixture of terrified and excited by the cracks - it is natural to leave home, to leave the status quo. We can always carry our nostalgia with us, a little comfort along the way, just not so much that we are weighted down and unable to move.

From machines to humans

Since the industrial revolution, we have essentially been treated very much like machines. Our culture has rewarded work over home life, memorisation of facts over critical thinking. With machines now in place to take over so much, my sincere hope is that we will begin to re-tune ourselves to our genuine nature.

Which is this: we are of nature. We are organic, living, wild, organised, incredibly complex energetic beings. We can experience love, and the ocean, and we can dance and sing and kiss. We can live an actual real life.

We can't outrun technology or change. But we can embrace what is already here - and we can be kind to each other. In the end, that might be the most radical and necessary thing of all.

Thank you for reading, and as always, I welcome your thoughts.

Best,

Freya