2026: Continuing Our Intuitive Dance with the Unknown

My personal five guiding principles to sync with the magic that unfolds this year

January 1, 2026 | Zurich, Switzerland

HAPPY NEW YEAR💛

I hope you are enjoying this time of year- a time for personal reflection and renewed hopes for the future. It’s also the period when most of the Earth’s population slows down, which is pretty significant when you consider the scale.

I began 2025 with an article titled “2025: An Intuitive Dance With The Unknown: Mastering the Art of Living Life The Way Top Jazz Musicians Jam.” In that article, I stated that the extent to which we thrive in the coming year and beyond will be directly linked to our ability to face uncertainties by intuitively improvising and tuning into the new potentialities they bring. I concluded the article by saying, “I dream of 2025 being the year that brings this out of us.”

I personally feel that my dream has come true to some extent. I see more and more people (knowingly or unknowingly) living this way, and I notice this shift bringing out potentialities that we might not have recognized otherwise. It’s important mentioning however that it makes all the difference whether we embody that way of living or we feel forced into it. The latter does not work in the same way.

And that brings me right into the new year and what I feel is important ahead.

The Year Ahead ✨

I came across the sculpture in the photo below, and it brought a smile to my face. It consists of 75 lights arranged to echo the silhouette of the plane trees that surround it. The lights pulse in ever-changing and seemingly chaotic patterns, capturing the rhythm and restlessness of human activity.

Traffic Light Tree by Pierre Vivant | Photo by Tom, TiredOfLondon on Flickr

For me, the sculpture greatly symbolizes the messy, contradictory, and confusing signals we receive from the world around us. The simultaneity of red and green signals serves as a powerful metaphor for how we often feel when trying to decipher what is right or wrong, when to act, and when to hold back. It also reminds us of the serenity and grandeur of the nature surrounding us, which we often overlook when focusing on the stimuli coming right at us.

So, how do we live with these messy, contradictory, and never-ending stimuli? I will share my personal refreshed rules for the year ahead and I hope they will provoke you to think what yours are- maybe similar, maybe very different.

1 | Looking at the “Trees”

I will not even attempt to explain how important reconnecting with Nature is for each of us in the current state of the world. It’s critical on so many levels- health, sanity, wisdom, interconnectedness, understanding systems… The list is endless, and a lot has been written about these themes. The bottom line is that taking a stroll or even just staring for a second at the majestic trees behind the lights has the power to change our perspective and give us what sometimes feels like a whole new mind. You can even try it with the photo above. For me, focusing on the messy and contradictory lights makes me anxious. Concentrating on the trees makes me laugh at the lights.

Nature wields a majic influence over us. Even a brief glance away from the screen can bring a totally new and wiser perspective.

2 | Including All. Especially the Unacceptable.

That’s probably the most difficult thing for most of us. Our minds tell us that the lights cannot all be correct because they give contradictory signals. We feel far more comfortable knowing which one is right and which one is wrong.

In reality -more often than not- they are all right.

This always reminds me of the contradictions between my parents and me when my home country was transitioning from communism to capitalism. We never reconciled our political differences, just as people today cannot agree on COVID, Trump, and virtually everything else. Looking back at our arguments from 35 years ago, I can firmly say that, although our beliefs seemed 180 degrees different and irreconcilable, we were all right.

Wisdom is the ability to hold multiple contradictory perspectives simultaneously in our mind and to make our next moves from a place that includes them all, without judging either of them as right or wrong.

And if you are more than 50 years old, I would also add- trust the youth.

When we get older, we tend to judge the choices young people make from a place of not understanding their world. We need to think twice when we catch ourselves saying “kids these days”, “the world is going downhill”, “we’re living in decline” or “the youth are ruining everything.”

The fact is that they are living in completely different times and building a world for themselves we will not be part of. And that leads me to the next point.

3 | Imagining “Beyound Work” and “Basic Needs”

Following “the world is going downhill” mindset, I sometimes catch myself dreading what AI, and especially AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), will bring. Although I’m generally an optimistic person who trusts the future, I listen with horror to some of the gloomier predictions. The most common one is that AGI will achieve god‑like intelligence and be capable of doing everything humans can do and then some.

Yes, I hear that: machines will take over all jobs, and that raises many problems and tough decisions for humanity. Yet, in every scenario I’ve encountered, the predictions stop there. No one I’ve heard of ventures beyond the question of what humans will do when they no longer have to work and their basic needs are met. How will they create meaning? I don’t have a definitive answer either, but I’d like to offer a small metaphor for human ingenuity.

I recently watched a job interview conducted by a very sophisticated AI. The candidate was applying for a position at a corporation that had likely invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a modern technology designed to replace many people in the recruitment unit of its HR department. From the side, I observed the online interview and was impressed by the technology. The AI asked good questions, drilled into the applicant’s résumé, and responded dynamically. It was interactive, multi‑layered, and certainly not a stupid chatbot.

However, as often happens, the developers didn’t fully account for The Human Advantage. While the AI probably monitored the candidate’s movements, posture, tone, and answers, it couldn’t fully anticipate the applicant’s ingenuity. The applicant had a low‑tech-high‑human solution: a friend, hidden from the camera, listened to the AI’s questions, used another AI to find the answers, and fed them to the applicant via a separate screen.

The next version of the interviewing AI will likely close that loophole, but I’m confident the next applicant will discover a new one. Just as I am confident that humans can find meaning in life outside the current work-dominated paradigm.

So, why do we often underestimate and belittle The Human Advantage?

One possible answer is that we continue to view ourselves as “working machines,” devaluing qualities such as creativity, consciousness, wisdom, intuition, ingenuity, and agency, to name a few. As a rule, many of us cannot conceive a reality beyond work, material accumulation, or the pursuit of cool experiences. We’re bombarded with “find your purpose” messages, most of which end up as self‑branding statements that serve the next career move. Consequently, many people find it hard to answer “who are you?” without referencing what they do.

It’s been 15 years since I experienced my first identity crisis as I was trying to discover who I am outside of my work. I’ve made considerable progress, but there’s still more to explore. My plan is to continue focusing on what I call The Human Advantage- the aspects of my humanness no machine can replicate.

I hope you will do the same, and here is my 2026 challenge for you:

What would you do if you didn’t have to work and your basic needs were met? Let’s figure that out, and once we do, let’s do some of those things in 2026.

For me, it is an exploration with more questions than answers. And yet, I already know that it means carving out tiny moments of “un‑busying” myself focused on exploring my creativity, expanding my intuitive knowing and connection to nature and all-ness.

How will I do that? Well, I’ll hope to share more in 2026 as we continue our journey together through The Human Advantage.

In the meantime, here are two more of my own insights.

4 | Reintroducing Your Old-self to Your New-self

What I’ve recently discovered is that I learn a great deal from my old articles.

Why, you may wonder?

Because, like anyone else, I keep making the same mistakes over and over, just in newer versions.

Revisiting my past writings has been eye‑opening, inspiring, and supportive and I hope you will do that too.

Take time to get to know your former self at different stages of your life by rereading your articles, journals, letters, and any other records you have of a previous version of you. It’s priceless even when going just one year back.

5 | Embracing the Magic of Surrender

My biggest and most profound experiences in 2025 have been about surrender. If you’re anything like me, especially the older versions of myself, you probably resent the idea of surrender. You see yourself as the maker of your life, feeling in control, and that sense of personal agency is part of your identity. Well, that has changed for me. I won’t go into the details of those experiences now; I’ll simply say that I hope to create conditions for more moments like them.

To illustrate why this matters, I’ll revisit an old article of mine titled “What If It’s Supposed To Be Like That?.” In it, I compare our lives to a surfer riding a rough ocean:
“At that moment, he is not contemplating why this rough ocean and why it is happening to him exactly. He is not analyzing everything he did in the past for this to happen to him. If he starts doing that, his life will probably be in danger. And yet, this is what most of us do. Instead, he is finding the best angle and posture to lean into what’s coming, feeling fully alive and one with the ocean because his whole life has prepared him to be here and now in these rough waves. The surfer is probably even grateful that the ocean has turned wilder today, because if it had not, he would not have had the opportunity to find out that he can handle far more than he ever imagined.”

I invite you to live like that surfer. Don’t negotiate with the ocean to make it calmer, and don’t judge it for being rough. Engage with the moment with your whole being, trusting that every experience you’ve been though has prepared you to meet exactly this moment and exactly now.

With love,
Natalia