December Reflections: What We Choose to Carry Forward

Dr. Darline Wilkenson
Dec 23, 2025
4 min read

There is a peculiar magic in November.

The weight of a year settles heaviest in December. Not in the festivities or the forced cheer, but in the quiet moments between when the noise dies and we're left alone with the truth of what we've survived. December doesn't ask us to celebrate what happened. It demands we reckon with who we became in the process.

This year has been a reckoning. For many in our community, 2024 has been less about building and more about not breaking. We buried loved ones too soon. We watched neighbors displaced, families fractured by policy and circumstance. We have felt the exhaustion that comes from being everyone's pillar when our own foundation is cracking. We have witnessed systems designed to protect us, fail spectacularly, leaving us to catch each other in freefall.

And yet. Here we stand. Mouths still moving. Hearts still beating out rhythms of resistance and hope. But December is not interested in our survival alone, but in our evolution. It asks the questions we've been too busy to face: What stories are we telling about ourselves when no one else is watching? What have we normalized that should shake us awake? How are we leading when leadership means more than showing up? Leadership is about showing the way.

The Trap of Perpetual Motion

We have become experts in pivots. One crisis ends; another begins. We reset, we strategize, we push forward. There is always another mountain, another battle, another emergency requiring our immediate attention.

But growth does not live in constant motion. Growth lives in the pause. Too many of us will rush headlong into January armed with resolutions we have not earned through reflection. We will declare new goals without examining old patterns. We will promise change without understanding what needs to transform. This is not ambition. This is avoidance. The questions that matter require stillness:

What did this year teach us about our limits? What truths did we learn about our leadership when pressure exposed every weakness? What person, pattern, or belief did this year demand we finally release? Where did we show up fully, and where did we merely go through motions?

These questions have teeth. They will bite if you let them get close enough. But that bite is necessary medicine.

The Stories We Tell, The World We Shape

As a community, we must also examine the narratives we're broadcasting to the world. Not because we should perform for anyone's comfort, but because we owe ourselves the full story.

When every image we share, every conversation we amplify, every headline we center, focuses solely on chaos, poverty, and collapse, we become complicit in our own erasure. We teach the world, and worse, we teach our children that struggle is our only identity.

This is not about lying. This is about telling the whole truth. Yes, we face crises. Yes, systems fail us. Yes, the fight is long and the resources are scarce. But we are also the woman who turned her kitchen table into a business empire. We are the father who works three jobs and still shows up to coach little league. We are the student who translated for her parents at age eight and now argues cases in courtrooms. We are the grandmother whose garden feeds half the block. We are the innovator, the organizer, the culture keeper, the one who says, "not on my watch" and means it.

Balance is not betrayal. It is honesty. When we highlight only devastation, we give the world permission to see us as permanent victims. When we display only triumph, we erase the context that makes our victories miraculous. The truth lives in both, and we must have the courage to hold both simultaneously.

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Legacy Is Not What We Leave Behind, It's What We Plant Now

December forces us to think generationally. Not sentimentally, but strategically. What are we actually passing down? Not just heirlooms or property, but the tools to navigate a world designed to exclude us. Are we teaching our children how to read contracts, how to challenge unjust authority, how to build wealth in hostile systems? Or are we simply warning them that the world is hard and hoping they figure it out?

Knowledge is power. But unshared knowledge is a tragedy. Silence about how things work, how government functions, how credit builds, how legal rights protect, how organizing creates change, is a tax our children shouldn't have to pay. Every lesson we withhold is a battle they'll fight blind.

Preparation is love in action. It says: I cannot protect you from everything, but I can equip you for anything.

Transition Is an Art Form

Endings are not failures. They are doorways. But how we move through those doorways determines everything. Do we stumble through, exhausted and unchanged? Or do we step through intentionally, carrying only what serves, releasing what weighs us down?

This December, let us choose wisdom over volume. Let us choose to rest without guilt. Let us choose to rebuild what's broken, including the parts of ourselves we have been ignoring. Let us choose to tell stories that dignify our complexity, stories that will not confine us into easy narratives of either tragedy or triumph.

Let us choose leaders who don't just respond to crises but prevent them. Let us choose to become those leaders ourselves. Because what we carry forward into the new year will architect what comes next. And that choice, that singular, powerful choice, belongs to us alone.

December is the mirror. What it reflects is up to us.