What the Echo Carries

The days after Christmas always feels like a threshold. The celebration has passed, the rooms are quieter, and the calendar insists that something new is approaching—whether I am ready or not. In this space between endings and beginnings, I feel the echo of the season more than its sound: the residue of gathering, absence, and expectation lingering in the air. When the noise can no longer be avoided, I stay with it long enough to hear what it has been masking. I stand here holding anxiety in one hand and hope in the other, with grief quietly reverberating beneath them both.

I have been returning to a single line from the Color Purple musical as a kind of grounding note: “I have everything I need to live a bountiful life.” I repeat it not as a declaration of certainty, but as an act of trust. An echo, after all, is not the original sound—it is what remains once the voice has moved on. The words remind me that even now—especially now—I am resourced. I have breath, memory, imagination, and the capacity to meet what comes next, even if I cannot yet name it.

This time of year has a way of amplifying echoes from the past. Visiting old places—family homes, familiar streets, rooms that once held different versions of life—brings those reverberations forward. The people who shaped those moments still inhabit memory, even when they are no longer here to confirm the truth of what we remember. There is joy in that resonance, and also a quiet ache. Some echoes comfort. Others haunt. And some do both at once.

This year carried more than its share of strain—financial, emotional, and deeply personal. The echoes of it were constant at times, filling the space where clarity might otherwise settle. And yet, within that reverberation, something shifted. When the noise refused to fade, I remained present long enough to hear what it had been masking.

I learned how to stay with fear instead of bracing against it. I found ways to steady myself through attention and repetition—through making something tangible when everything else felt unmoored. In moments that once might have collapsed into overwhelm, I discovered small points of focus: a sentence that held, an image that clarified, a frame that revealed what words alone could not. What emerged did not arrive fully formed or announced. It surfaced quietly, once the noise loosened its grip.

Perhaps healing is not about silencing the echo, but about changing my relationship to it.

There were times it felt like calling into the echo itself—meeting exhaustion and rawness without ornament or defense. But the sound that returned was different than I expected. Not louder. Not cleaner. Just truer. Fear did not disappear, but it lost its authority. In learning how to stay, I learned how to move.

The world beyond these personal reverberations remains uncertain. The times ahead do not offer clarity on demand. The ground under many of our shared assumptions has shifted, and anxiety rises easily in that instability. Yet hope persists—not as a grand gesture, but as a quieter frequency. I am learning that steadiness does not come from certainty, but from holding simple truths in the moment: that I am still here, that I can take the next step, that doubt does not disqualify me from continuing.

As I look toward the year ahead, I am listening carefully for which echoes I need to release. I need to leave behind the belief that clarity must arrive before action. I need to stop mistaking the persistence of an echo for a mandate to return to its source. I need to loosen my attachment to old rooms I no longer live in, even if I visit them from time to time.

At the same time, there are practices I want to fortify. I want patience that is active, not passive—patience that continues to build, to observe, to imagine, even when outcomes remain unclear. I want gratitude that makes room for grief instead of competing with it. I want to create from reality as it is, not from the false promise of certainty.

Perhaps healing is not about silencing the echo, but about letting it pass through without letting it define the room. About trusting that I can acknowledge what still resonates without being governed by it.

So as this year closes and another approaches, I am not asking the future to explain itself. I am listening for what is simple and true, and trusting that I will be okay. I have everything I need to live a bountiful life—not because the echoes have disappeared, but because I know how to listen, how to stay, and how to keep moving even as the sound fades.

And in this quiet, just before the new year, that is enough.

Author’s Note