I will be honest with you: I wasn’t sure if I would still be alive this Christmas. Exactly a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I remember cutting my waist-length hair before going to the hospital for my first chemo and wondering if I would survive treatment. Would I ever experience warm summer sun on my skin again? Would I ever take a walk in crisp autumn air? Or decorate a Christmas tree? At that point, my only wish was to survive. Now that I am cancer-free, my wish is to truly live and appreciate every moment of every day.
I was reminded of the words of one of my favourite writers, Ryszard Kapuscinski:
“There are days, sometimes weeks, that are mentally and emotionally empty. Days that are like cavities, days that are like steam escaping. Our subjective time can be broken down into days lived and days spent. The human capacity to experience: How limited it is. We eagerly escape from experiencing to being.”
I heard these words often in my head in the last year.
It has been 7 months since I finished my treatment. The cancer is gone, and I hope it will never come back.
December is a kind of mystical month. On the 6th of December, we celebrate Santa Clause Day in Poland, then we have Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It is time we spend with our loved ones, when we think about the year that has passed and make plans for a new year. For us at M-Powered, it is also a special time because on the 7th of December, we celebrate our company birthday. We are 4 years old now!
Today I wish for myself more than just one more year of life!
My colleagues and I made a list of what we wish for ourselves and for all of you in our M-Powered community for the year ahead.
M-Powered is celebrating 4 YEARS!
And what a year we have had. What did it bring?
- Cancer…
- And cancer recovery! (definitely better than the first item on this listJ )
- The pandemic…
- And lessons on how to live within a pandemic
- A lot of rest and self-reflection
- Courses in Ireland for great groups of educators from France, Poland and Czech Republic.
- Our online shop
- M-Powered eBooks about project management
- Ideas for creativity projects with European partners, such as Art Square Lab and the Children’s University
- The Creativity Academy at the Krakow Pedagogical University
- Supporting a worldwide, humanitarian project
- And most importantly calmness and peace, against all odds… And this is what we wish you all!
All we want for Christmas at M-Powered…
We hope that the next year will be much more peaceful for all of us. Seeing as it’s a time of year for wishing and dreaming, we made this list of all we want for Christmas at M-Powered is:
- Cleaner air
- More tolerance and respect for human rights
- A trip to Zermatt to see the Matterhorn mountain again
- A pair of warm skiing gloves
- Health
- Snow
- More feminine energy present in different aspects: power, economy, politics, science
- Max 30 working hours per week
- Mindfulness lessons in schools
- Discovering cheap source of energy that is not harmful for our planet
- Re-building society after COVID-19 in a way that puts people and communities first
- To travel and enjoy artistic experiences again (we have missed films, music, exhibitions, and theatre!)
Perhaps our wishes are very ambitious or even utopian. But when, if not during this magical time, should we dream about the future we would like to live in?
What about you – what do you want for Christmas?
We would like to wish you a very peaceful Christmas time, full of love and good humour!
The M-Powered team
