So today I’ve offered you some predictions about the next year in architectural design. I hope they help. For me design predictions are pretty easy to do. What’s far more challenging is making any other kind of useful prediction. I know better, but I’m also too foolish to be warned off the effort so, of course, I sat down this morning and stared for God knows how long at an intimidatingly blank page while asking myself, “What is the essence of the New Year? What will 2022 look like?”

Turns out my first hunch was correct—it’s an impossible question to answer.

But then, right as I was about to give up, it dawned on me. There was the New Year right in front of me. What is the essence of the New Year? It’s an intimidating blank page staring me in the face. A blank page waiting to be written upon.

2022 is an unnamed, unknown challenge that’s already begun taunting me, “I dare you. Try something new. Make something new. Be something new. Take all your imperfect, incomplete thoughts, and all your broken grammar and misspelled words, and put them out there in plain view for everyone to see. Then let’s find out if they’re worth keeping.”

Yeah … that sounds about right.

So I predict all sorts of things will happen to us this year. Things from outside and beyond our control. Things we can’t do anything about to stop or change. But the real important stuff, the stuff the blank page calls out to, is everything else. What will make or break my 2022, and yours, will be every thought, every dream, every plan and priority, every ignored emotional trigger, every untreated trauma, every unhealed wound, every impulse of love or fear, every story we choose tell ourselves, every moment of stillness we steal from the chaos, every ounce of resolve or retreat, courage or surrender, empathy or apathy. None of it will happen to us. All of it will come from within us. 2022 will come from within us, just like 2021 and every year before that.

The right answers only come from the right questions and I suppose what I’m trying to say here is “What will 2022 be like” is not the right question. The right question is, “What will you be like in in 2022?” To that question I hope the answer is something like better, stronger, deeper, and most of all, more alive and more pleasingly you.

May I remind you of just three things?

First, it is a miracle to be alive.

Second, whatever other meaning may be out there, you at least know that the meaning
of your life is to live it.

Finally, as George Eliot once said, “It is never too late to be what you might have been."

And so, that’s pretty much it. 2021 is one for the history books and 2022 is a blank page, staring us in the face and daring us, taunting us, maybe even begging us to step up, do us better, and get busy building ourselves a beautiful life.