For my New Year’s resolution, I choose to bring forward and prioritize two qualities I wrote about some months ago.
The first one is togetherness.
While letting the political opportunism further polarize and divide people, we tend to forget how quickly hateful words escalate into violent actions. Therefore, picking up from Jiddu Krishnamurti’s question: what will make a human being move away from this destructive, self-centred activity; My 2026 proposition is to work on understanding that we are all in this together. And the journey into togetherness starts by acknowledging that:
– We are not here to win one another nor to be won. – Nora Bateson.
– We are here to make «this» easier for each other; whatever this «this» might be – Kurt Vonnegut
It is so much more what unites us than it is what keeps us apart. But it takes integrity and authenticity to recognize that we are all equally different.
In that sense, I feel fortunate to have my private and professional life aligned. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with people and organizations whose values align with the only war worth fighting: the war on climate change. Among many exciting and inspiring projects I have been working on this past year, I must highlight the work with the Sustainability Ambassadors at the Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona.
Record warm temperatures and extreme weather events are increasingly becoming part of many people’s reality. As a species, we have shown an incredible ability to adapt. But there are limits. And our limits are not technological, ideological, political, or economic.
Our limits are biological and ecological.
Hopefully, more and more organizations will come to understand that, beyond a set of strategies, technologies, and policies, sustainability is a lifestyle that aligns with keeping the global temperature below 1.5 °C and planetary boundaries within their limits.
Hopefully, more and more people will understand that we are all in this together.
The second quality I bring into my 2026 proposition is active listening.
One of the reasons I have distanced myself from social media is the noise of polarized opinions that, run by algorithms, exploit human weakness. Yes, there is a lot of information out there, but having access to it is not the same as knowing or understanding it.
Yes, there is a lot to hear on social media, but it is not about passive listening. It is about actively hearing each other. And this requires creating a context of intersubjectivity that is quite rare in today’s world. It requires a space where the first-person plural feels more natural than the first-person singular.
We don’t have such space, at least not yet. But we do have something to begin with—a composition. I am talking about John Cage’s 4′33″, also called «Silent Piece». The piece lasts four minutes and thirty-three seconds, during which the performer plays nothing. In the score, with a single word, «Tacet,» the performer is instructed to remain silent and not play his instrument. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the instrument is the field of shared awareness.
The composition is not about the performer; it is about the listener’s experience. The sound material of the work consists of the noises that the spectator hears during that time.
We rarely get to experience this within the constant cacophony of mundane seeks for thrill, events, news, and entertainment. We hear so much that we hear nothing. Most importantly, we don’t hear each other. And by doing so, we don’t hear ourselves.
And this is where my second 2026 proposition comes: to help people and organizations create spaces of intersubjectivity and active listening.
Eventually, togetherness will align us into a global play where our inner authority will summon the entire Humanity to open the score, and instruct: ‘Tacet’. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of listening. Taking care of the space between us. A unit of understanding with all the senses.
The entire Humanity tuned into the Melody of Spheres during 4′33″ would leap so big that the generations yet to come will feel our gift coming. A time/space of eight billion souls equally different and interrelated by Tacet would pulsate us into a singularity. The bindings between eight billion fragments of Divinity awaken, unfolding the New Story.
Boris Matijas 