New year, new me, with plenty in life that's free. 

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There's often a sense of unreality when a new year dawns upon the horizon. Just a few months ago, 2025 sounded so futuristic. And yet, little appears to have really changed.

I certainly don't feel any older or wiser. And yet, I can't help but approach the start of a new year with fresh hope for what awaits down the road. "New year, new me," as they say.

Returning to my emails after a couple of days away is usually a tedious exercise in plumbing—one must remove buildup to again facilitate a healthy flow. And in the course of such activities, I'm sometimes led to unanticipated places, places where even angels fear to tread.

Places like LinkedIn.

Looking beyond the corporate word salad, AI boosterism and "inspirational" money-grubbing that accounts for the majority of LinkedIn content these days, I was struck by the message of one life-coach type who sought to bring new polish to the old cow-chip of "nothing in life is free" by expounding upon the practice of product and business testimonials.

One line in particular caught my eye: "I do not fully subscribe to 'Give for nothing in return' when it comes to business, imagine if every company did that in the world and the chaos that it would cause."

Oh, the horror! Imagine if our brittle economy operated on principles that differed from our custom of competitive quid pro quo, even for this one very minor example. Such "chaos" does not exactly say much for societal stability.

But to be fair to this writer and far too many like him, it is often difficult to see clearly when we are so enmeshed in relations and attitudes infused by the hoary axiom "nothing in life is free."

That attitude blinds us to the countless things in life—the truly worthwhile things—that do indeed come to us without any action on our part, things we receive in abundance without "paying" for them or "meriting" them. We use broad descriptors like truth, beauty and goodness, but they manifest themselves in countless ways, from the love of another to a truly affecting sunset.

Coming from a historical background, I also happen to believe that we are in dialogue with those who lived before us and those who will come after us, which imparts additional meaning and profundity to that which we so abundantly receive.

"The realm of human relations," observed the educator Parley A. Christensen (1888-1968), "includes also our relations with all who have lived in the past, who have lived and left us an inheritance of their thought, their feeling, their creativity. How can anyone aware of this inheritance speak of it except in terms of indebtedness, in terms of gratitude for a priceless possession never to be earned, but only to be appreciated? It would seem to me that the measure of our humanity is the degree to which we are participating in this human inheritance."

One hardly has much to say on either goodness, truth or beauty who despises and ignores what has been left to us by those who served and loved, who thought and explored, who waxed imaginative. Yet we do this on a regular basis when we look all around us and see only commodities to be sold while shunning any notion of personal indebtedness for fear of feeling beholden to anyone or anything.

So here we are, on the threshold of a new year, with monied revanchist movements ravaging the body politic. Here we are, with our understanding of our past, present and future ever more impoverished by the conveniences and technologies devised for the accumulation of wealth. Here we are, acutely aware of the cost of everything while appreciating the value of nothing.

Nevertheless, there remain innumerable examples of beauty, truth and goodness around our world and in each of our lives. They're easy to miss, but they give meaning to everything else we do.

They are there, a free gift bequeathed to us as part of our vast inheritance.

In this new year, what will we contribute to our inheritance—even if we don't see the fruits in our day? Do we appreciate what we leave behind by doing so?

"I know what a risk one runs from the vigorously athletic crowds in being styled an idealist in these days, when thrones have lost their dignity and prophets have become an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of the market-place," remarked Rabindranath Tagore to his Japanese audience in 1917. "Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills, ... the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment,—that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with this world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies."

Unreal as it may seem, a new year has dawned and we have been given so much. Care to participate?

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