I dreamed I had just finished the college entrance exam, brimming with anticipation as I went to check my score. I thought to myself: if this year’s result disappoints me, I’ll come back again next year. The thrill was in the possibility of infinite retries, the belief that challenges could be met as many times as needed.

Only later, years down the road, did I learn that the hardest struggles were the ones where the path allowed no turning back. Yet, I never felt regret for those irreversible crossings between people, nor did I wish to undo them. Instead, I drifted along the current of time as if it were my native water, trusting that, eventually, every goose that flew west would return. Still, those single, irrevocable choices—the departures, the encounters that felt like fate—always made my frantic efforts to resist the flood seem helpless, even futile.

It was, after all, in the deep of winter that I discovered an unconquerable summer within me. Looking back, that was the summer of my exam’s end: a season bright and clear, suspended between an unreachable past and a future still filled with promise, keeping the dim present afloat with the faintest ripple of hope.

At the close of 2023, in New Zealand’s South Island, the world seemed to return to some unspoken, unformed state. The landscape was vast, majestic, and silent, needing no words. Only Shakespeare seemed to offer solace to those of us stumbling through daily missteps: Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.