The Year of Storms and the Light Within

The year 2025 unfolded like a vast canvas torn by relentless storms. The sky hung heavy and low, winds carrying unspoken omens sweeping in from the edges of the world. Floodwaters broke their banks in some places; mountains, long dormant, suddenly crumbled; flames crept across drought-stricken wilderness, as if nature itself sought to remind us—civilization is never more stable than a sheet of fragile paper.

Meanwhile, human calamities quietly grew in the shadows.
The shadow of economic despair left many teetering on the trembling edge of survival; the thunder of war echoed in the distance, a tireless beast tearing silence between cities. Streets once filled with laughter turned to rubble, schools to charred ruins, and children’s toys, still warm, buried under dust.

The world had become a burning oil painting.

In times of chaos, the heart reveals its deepest textures.
Some choose to sink, exchanging deceit for fleeting breath, violence for refuge, greed to fend off the void of the future.
Nations, like great beasts driven by iron and desire, reach greedily for more land and resources, heedless of the cries of those who dwell there.

The fire of war illuminated the faces of the innocent; their cries were like shattered shells carried away by endless tides.

In this moment, the age itself became a vast trial.
It tested not just our survival, but whether we could still claim the dignity of being human—that spark of kindness and clarity hidden deep within.

Thus arose a question ancient and immense, quietly ascending from the heart of the storm:

When disaster compresses the world into suffocating weight, can humanity still hold on to its faith?
When all lights are extinguished, can a single flicker still be kindled within the chest?

An old Chinese saying goes, “Three feet above your head stands a deity.”
But I have come to understand that this deity is neither a watching eye from the heavens, nor an unseen hand that guards life—
That deity is our own conscience.
Like a breeze weaving softly over scorched earth,
like a faint glow trying to light the way from the abyss’s edge.

Society may crumble, systems may falter, wealth may dissipate—but what we truly rely on is that unyielding moral baseline.

If this year were a canvas still wet with paint, then:
Natural disasters were the torn background,
War the cold, harsh brushstrokes,
Economic collapse the deep shadows of brown and grey.

And each of us—
We are the colors that decide whether the painting fades to darkness or gradually fills with light.

Some fall to their knees beside ruins; some lift each other from the wasteland.
Some, driven by the fear of survival, strike blows; some, from the same fear, reach out their hands.
The same wind blows, but it carries very different choices;
The same sea reflects very different hearts.

It is conscience that keeps humanity from becoming a wave that destroys itself,
Restraint that spares civilization from shattering in the gale.

The night sky had been veiled by smoke and ash, but as the winds shift and dust settles, the stars remain，
Cold, distant, yet eternal.

They remind us:
Our smallness is not a curse, but the reason we understand the need for unity;
Darkness is not the end, but the condition for light to exist.

If humanity is a small boat drifting upon the sea, then the stars are the direction we cannot grasp but must look toward.
That direction is not religion, not power, not conquest.
It is kindness, respect, mutual care, the refusal to give up our humanity even in despair.

2026 is rising slowly from beyond the horizon.
Like an early spring wind, still carrying a chill, but also the faint scent of new buds.
The world is not healed, wounds remain in the heart, yet the new year waits for us to answer again—

What colors shall we choose to paint the unfinished canvas?
Will it remain shrouded in gloom, or be filled anew with light?

May we never forget compassion in our suffering.
May we never forsake kindness in hardship.
May the wind after the storm find us picking up fragments of starlight in the ruins, returning them to the depths of the night sky.

May 2026 be illuminated not merely by hopes whispered in prayer,
but by the conscience and persistence we guard together.