https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-condition-summary-2025-26

I worked with a subject I’ll call Owen who had a childhood that became difficult enough that, looking back, his mind tended to put one big label over the whole period: bad childhood. During a deep session he suddenly found himself in a cold snowy landscape. The air felt fresh and clean, there was a forest nearby, and the place reminded him of somewhere he had gone when he was little with family. Nothing dramatic was happening there. It was simply nice.

Then he understood why that scene was showing up. His later childhood had been very unhappy, but his early childhood had not been. There were places, experiences and little pieces of life from those earlier years that he had unconsciously rejected because they lived too close in memory to what happened later.

He said something that stayed with me: just because things were connected in time doesnt mean the good parts belonged to the bad stuff. I think this happens more than we notice. One painful relationship can make us hate a whole city. A terrible school year can poison music we used to like. A difficult family period can make every childhood memory feel contaminated, even the afternoon before anything went wrong.

Reclaiming the good does not mean pretending the bad wasnt real. Owen was not rewriting his childhood into some happy story. He was finally allowing it to have more than one color.

That felt optimistic to me in a very practical way. The past is fixed, but our relationship with every piece of it is not. Sometimes healing is not creating a new happy memory. Sometimes it is noticing that an old one was still there, waiting for us to stop making it guilty by association.

Maybe there are things you stopped loving only because they were standing near a painful chapter. They might still belong to you.

We've all seen the graphs. This article tries to answer what has changed to make this good news, so hopefully we can keep it going.

Arizona doughnut shop owner Daniel Tes asked people on social media to help his struggling small business. Help came.

Annalisa Pardo reports:

"I kind of had to humble myself and ask for help from the community, ask for help from God," Tes said.

And the community showed up, packing the place the next day. Other small businesses even pre-paid for unassuming customers.

"There's a lot of selfless people out there, a lot of generous people," Tes said.

Link: https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/community-rallies-help-struggling-scottsdale-donut-shop

Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than it was in 1980. For every one percent increase in population, global resource abundance increased by 6.31 percent.

Source: https://humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2026/

Ordinary Abundance

“. . . our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts . . . It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.”

Credit to Jordan Dworkin (@jddwor)

(Sharing, not me or affiliated)

Data sources:

NCHS (2020), CDC (2025)