What a privilege to have the opportunity to write the foreword to our monthly newsletter at the end of 2023! As we move toward Christmas and the festive season, we also move toward the end of the year and the beginning of 2024.
And what a year 2023 was! Certainly not the best of years for the economy if one listens to most commentators on the property industry.
I hear a lot of chatter among clients, friends, colleagues, in general conversation and on the radio stations, from people being “tired of this year” and most “cannot wait for this year to end”. It is to be expected as we start to hear the Christmas carols playing all over and see the Christmas decorations going up everywhere. Our hearts automatically leap with excitement, and we almost literally want to shove the current year and all its troubles behind us.
In a way I think we are conditioned to see the New Year as a fresh start, a new page from which we can start afresh. New possibilities and new opportunities await, and we can turn a blind eye on the near misses, losses and failures that may have crossed our paths in the year we leave behind. Not even casting a view in the rearview mirror, we put “pedal to the metal” and blast off into the New Year, filled with renewed energy.
Until a few months in, when we realise that the turn of the calendar did not magically transform our lives into everything we ever hoped for.
I read a beautiful letter on a grief support group this week giving comfort to those who are going through the grieving process, describing death as a form of birth. It read: “Remember, ‘death’ is a birth.. that means the part of us that feels like it is being ripped apart and dying, is actually expanding. It is becoming more than it ever was and birth is painful.”
In a way, this is also what we are going through at the end of any year or any phase of our lives. A “death” from the old and a “rebirth” into the new.
I wish I could quote the whole letter here, but the essence is that we grow from that which we experience, even the pain we go through.
In the same way one might argue that we grow through each year we go through – especially the tough years! Those years which taught us grit, determination, endurance, patience and resilience are the ones in which we grow the most. And therefore, we cannot just cross out the year 2023 as if it never happened. We cannot just turn our backs on it and shove it aside. We have to learn from it. We have to acknowledge it for the part it played in our lives. For the lessons it taught us and the resilience it built.
Only then we can be reborn into the New Year. Then we will have renewed strength – not because we left the year behind us, but because, as we depart from it, we move forward anew, reborn, reformed, stronger and wiser. Better equipped and armed for whatever the New Year may bring.
Wishing you and yours a blessed Christmas and a well-deserved rest this Festive Season. May you spend time reflecting on the lessons learned and may the year 2024 truly be the beginning of an exciting, truly happy and very successful new chapter.
Regards
Mariëtte van Zyl | Director
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