What are your biggest challenges?

To all WordPress and Jetpack linked bloggers

Wishing you and yours all the very best for the time of the year in which we live – celebration of Christmas and entry into the new year.

.

I hope you can look back on 2023 as one during which you had much to celebrate as well as challenges to master. For us all, 2024 will offer 52 weeks of yet-to-be-experienced anticipation.

This year, it seems to me that there is a “forced joyfulness“ about the weeks of the festive season. With so much trouble in the world and with so many things going wrong on the International and domestic fronts, we are all making an effort to secure feelings of well-being during the 2023/24 Christmas and New Year period.

I just hope this lasts into the months of 2024. The year just ended gave very little that could be described as offering long-term optimism. So many people continue to struggle.

As we look at 2024 it seems that we have to hope that things will be better. That ‘hope without fulfilment’ has been the challenge besetting the world for the last three or four years. Whether or not the hope of an upturn in outlook and action for 2024 becomes a fulfilment or remains a distant hope is a matter that is very much up In the air.

Hopes:

That the Israel and Hamas conflict will resolve quickly.

That the Ukraine and Russian conflict will be over before 2024 is out.

That China will do less sabre rattling against Taiwan.

That the people of Australia will become more united and less divided by cultural, ethnic and religious considerations.

That the myriad of conflicts in every part of the world will cease and dialogue will lead to solutions.

That people will think ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ and ‘me’ in isolation from ‘us’.

That spending priorities will place the necessities of life ahead of frittering activities.

That all parents will take far better primary care of their children, rather than preferring institutional upbringing of their offspring.

That the world, locally, regionally and globally will be threatened less in terms of weather, climate and environmental disasters.