As we welcome back the return of the light and a new year, it is a time to reflect, to celebrate, to mourn, to plan and to take stock.
For me, 2025 brought many wonderful gifts and also many challenges. These gifts and challenges were — and are — distributed across different domains in my life. There is what one might think of as the world. There is home life and family. There are close friends. And there is my own life — body, mind, and spirit.
I would like to take this time to share and reflect a little on some of these spaces and stories.
I know that more of my life is behind me instead of in front of me. I have lost many friends and family over the last year. I started a list — not limited to 2025 — and stopped without completing it at forty. I know the list will grow and I know I will be on someone’s list in the not-too-distant future.
That brings up many feelings and thoughts.
I know the time that I have left is a gift. But I think about my children and other people's children. How do I honor them? How do we use our time and resources wisely and fully? What kind of world will we create and inhabit for our children and young adults?
Hopefully that is not just a question for me but for all of us — or at least some of us.
As I share some of my musings about this, it might be helpful to start with how I think about the world.
One of my friends and teachers on the growing list of people who we have lost recently is Dr. Joanna Macy. Years ago, as I struggled with my place in the world and how much disregard I felt we visited in the world, I read Joanna’s book World as Lover, World as Self. It had a profound effect on me because it helped to blur the lines between the world and me.
I approach much of the world through songs. And one of my favorite lyrics, very much in the spirit of what I took from Joanna’s book and later work, comes from the jazz musician Don Cherry. In his song “Universal Mother,” he sings “the outside is not, the inside it too. See yourself through.”
This non-duality — or perhaps complicating duality — has continued to inform my life and work. So when I reflect on the world and on myself, or on you, there is not just a neat line that sorts things for me. In some sense, I feel both the joy of the world and its suffering. I believe the frame of separation — between us and the world, and between us and each other — is indeed contributing mightily to what I refer to as surplus suffering.
I recently had brunch with two people who just finished their college degrees. They are both African Americans and are mixed — well aren’t we all? — a young man who wants to work in national security, and a woman who is an artist.
They were both engaged and yet approached the future with some pause.
For the purposes of this letter we’ll call them Paul and Peggy. Paul believes the world naturally swings back and forth, so despite our current issues around race relations, as well as government attacks on critical safety-net programs and immigrants, he believes we will swing back to a more humane position. Peggy is worried about the environment, but believes that within her world of art she has the space she needs to thrive.
They both express long-term hope, but were reluctant to have children — both because of lack of support for families and because of increasing threats in the world. The conversation then turned to my own sense of the future and of hopefulness.
Those of you who follow my work will not be surprised by what I shared with them: I don’t organize around hope or despair. I am concerned that both positions are often passive. While I believe we need some humility, we also have agency individually and collectively. We cannot know how things will turn out.
That is not our charge.
Our charge is to engage and to work for the world we want to live in, and to help ensure that all our children — and non-human life — can thrive.
I have the privilege and responsibility to direct the Othering and Belonging Institute here at UC Berkeley. Our mission is to help promote a global norm and practice where all people belong and none are othered. We believe this is a norm that should orient our work, and the work of others.
Some may protest that it is not possible. We believe it may be, and it may not be, but neither position should detract us from the charge.
There has been a long history of people reaching for and expanding belonging, but often this is associated with one group belonging and another being categorically othered. I do not believe the moral arc of the universe bends in one direction or the other without our agency.
We all already belong. Full stop.
Yet through our legal, religious and cultural practices, we fight this reality — injuring the so-called other, the earth, and ourselves.
Many of our efforts have reached toward the norm of belonging without othering. I am currently working on a short piece called The Seeds of Belonging. In this article, I try to highlight some historical and existing movements toward belonging without othering. Think about the Declaration of Independence that all men (people) are equal; the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights; declarations against slavery and the idea that we are all children of God (or the universe).
I am certainly not claiming that we currently live up to these aspirations. But there have been, and continue to be, many efforts pointing us in this direction.
Undoubtedly, you may still be weary not just of our shortcomings but also the push against belonging in favor of dominance and raw power. There is an effort underway to construct a smaller and smaller “we,” or to make belonging conditional.
Much of the othering that goes on in the world is actually motivated by belonging and fear. There is a claim that the other is threatening your group’s belonging, and that you get to belong by excluding the other. These claims of replacement are being deployed at the highest levels of power, and must be challenged without further othering.
But our work is also not just to oppose this — it is to claim and reclaim belonging without othering.
That charge can be difficult during times of uncertainty, as we wonder how the future will unfold and ask ourselves many important questions moving forward: Will AI be used to promote human thriving — or hierarchy and subjugation? Will trillionaires rule the masses? Will countries accelerate sorting by race and religion? Will we learn to include the earth in efforts toward belonging? Will we create new systems and language for belonging? Will corporations be employed for the betterment of all?
That is up to all of us to decide.
I do not believe in hope. But I do believe in you.
Let’s stop just hoping — or despairing — about the future, and instead organize our structures, stories, culture and tools like AI to help call a future where all belong and no group is othered into being.
If you wish to engage or share with us, we are here to work together.
Have a wonderful 2026.
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Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this letter are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the author.
