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Amen. Happy New Year!

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For a Happy 2023, I wish you a Good Evening this New Year’s Eve and every evening. I think greeting a Good Evening sincerely (from the heart, Dil Se) and a good evening (in the process) can seed the mind with initial conditions for a good night’s sleep to wake up and experience a good morning prepared to reduce the chaos in our routines rushing to be enslaved in a daily routine. Why do I wish that in 2023, the greeting “Good Evening” will be a special reminder? Because chaotic routines are not good practices, we need to be the cause of goodness.

In a hectic, insomniac lifestyle rushing to work in-person or online, with social media distractions, being under surveillance, and mandatory compliance, we trap ourselves in a fight/fight mode (a low order of consciousness). We often do not appreciate and value the evening as a special time and a process to end the chaos in our life.  How we make meaning [of the evening] is often corrupted by our biases and cognitive distortions, such as the “fallacy of fairness.”

When we value evening (in time) and validate it as a process, we can change how we make meaning—changing how you construct meaning changes you. Even the playing field reminds us to be fair and to make an effort to provide equal opportunity for all. A prayer mat, a table, or a floor, are flat, are even surfaces. Even numbers divided by two give two whole [equal] numbers. Wholeness means integrity, and hypocrisy is the opposite. What is so holistic about even? How do we even things out, and why don’t we call this process evening?

The evening can be a process that brings fairness and a time to pause, pray, and [or] party. Preferably [and], but if you choose [or] practice responsibly, perhaps your good practices will generate the wisdom to know and feel why and makes sense. 

So let us commit to reducing and ending meanness in 2023 and beyond. Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky (T. S. Eliot), to observe how the evening of life brings with it its lamps (Joseph Joubert) to illuminate why in the morning there is the meaning of mean that we often need to change, and that is why in the evening there is feeling (Gertrude Stein). 

May your New Year’s Eve be a nice night for a good evening. For a Happy 2023, I wish you a Good Evening this New Year’s Eve.

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