These are the final days of the dramatic 2022, first days of 2023 - and the un-predictable is winning. What a year this has been! No sooner had we started to move on from the global pandemic - we plunged Into the greatest European war of aggression of the 21st century with completely unpredictable consequences for everyone. The only predictable factor of our time is unpredictability.

Psychosophy is the name given to the first spiritually-based psychology of the 20th century by Rudolf Steiner in 1910 in Berlin, together with the prediction that it will be a long time before people will be ready to apply it practically. As there was very little scope for practical application of it at the time – the foundation of Psychosophy was given in a very minimalist form, like a seed.

Beginnings are popular, endings are not. We celebrate weddings, no one celebrates divorces. We rejoice in the new birth of a child. We mark funerals, but with a sense of tragedy. We celebrate the glory and beauty and power of youth – but we grieve getting older and ageing is considered a form of sickness. We celebrate and declare our successes – but loss is considered a personal failure even though we learn from them more. Ends and beginnings are equal in importance – but not in appreciation.

All living beings have, at the very least, a centre and a boundary. Life is not possible with less than that. Life and its renewal depend on the creation and the restoration of one’s boundaries. The centre creates the periphery; the periphery protects the centre, at the same time.

A thin line separates aloneness from loneliness. Being alone is a fact of life, without value added. It could lead to loneliness or it could lead to deepening connection to oneself, to nature, to wisdom, to thinking, to creativity or to rest. Loneliness is a form of suffering. It is an experience of being cut off and isolated from everything and everyone, but primarily from one’s own soul.