THE END OF 2025

This year's "end" is a beautiful painting by the talented Greg Manchess

In both senses of the word

  

Greg's painting is about the commitment necessary to take meaningful creative risks.  

Greg observed, "If there’s no risk, the commitment weakens and ultimately doesn’t matter. There must be the risk of loss or failure, otherwise the challenge is minimal."  This picture is about taking that big leap, by an artist who has done so many times, and now counsels students over their own fear of hitting the ground.

Commitment is an important message for the end of the year (and for every year).   But I think this image summons additional power and profundity from the fact that it is an archetype. It spans a variety of human experiences and deals with the fear of losing our equilibrium in the broader sense. 

Stephen Crane wrote from a poet's perspective about dreading the possible meaninglessness of life:

If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant --
What then?

Freud offered a psychiatrist's perspective in his classic Interpretation of Dreams (1900): the universal dream of falling from great heights is our subconscious way of dealing with sexual excitement and release followed by the spectre of punishment by reality (the hard ground).

Today, modern psychologists have a different perspective, focusing on clinical cures for basophobia, the fear of falling. 

And this year in particular, many are concerned that the daily supports of civilization-- the rule of law, civil government, empirical science, democratic tolerance-- are being clawed away by rage, leaving society in free fall. 

Greg's great Archetype stretches across many human endeavors.  Some of them require a degree in psychiatry or auto mechanics.  Some require the skills of a poet or a taxidermist.  But dang if I don't love the way art spans them all, bringing them together in a single object of beauty.  

Happy new year to you all!