Winter 2026

Changing Seasons

It was a strange Winter in Cape Town.

I can hardly remember the really cold days. It felt as though we were caught somewhere between autumn and spring, with winter never quite managing to make its mark.

It has made me think about how much the world around us is changing too.

With AI becoming such a big part of our lives and businesses, I find myself thinking about the many people who have spent years building careers, businesses, and skills, only to suddenly feel a little unsure about where they fit in this new world.

Things that once felt certain don’t necessarily feel certain anymore.

The plans we made for our futures might need to be looked at again. The career we thought we would have until retirement, the business we thought we would keep building, the financial plans we thought would give us security one day.

It can be unsettling when the future you were working towards starts looking different from the one you imagined, and I think there are a lot of us feeling that uncertainty right now. There is comfort in remembering that we are all in this together. None of us really knows exactly what the next few years will look like. We are all trying to work it out as we go.

For us, that has meant taking things one day at a time and asking ourselves some fairly big questions.

What do we actually want our lives to look like?

What is still important to us?

And what are we holding onto simply because it was part of the plan?

Some of the answers have meant making difficult decisions. Letting go of things we once planned for, loved and worked hard to build.

That isn’t always easy. There can be a lot of emotion attached to the things we thought would be part of our lives forever.

But I am slowly learning that letting go isn’t necessarily losing something.

Sometimes it is making room.

Room for a simpler life, for being more present, for slowing down, for noticing the birds in the garden, the changing light, the first signs of spring and all the small things that are so easy to miss when we are constantly busy trying to secure a future that may no longer look the way we thought it would.

Nature seems to understand this instinctively.

The veld doesn’t try to hold onto summer. Leaves fall when their time has come, plants retreat when they need to, seeds sit quietly in the earth until the conditions are right for them to begin again.

Nothing is wasted. Nothing needs to stay the same forever.

The recent lunar eclipse felt like another little reminder of this. A time for letting go of what no longer serves us and making space for what comes next.

I don’t think we need to have the answers right now.

Perhaps we just need to be brave enough to acknowledge that some of the old plans no longer fit the lives we are actually living.

And maybe that is okay.

A retirement plan, a career, a business or a financial goal can be incredibly important, but none of them should come at the cost of the life we are living today. I have started to believe that the people who are willing to make some of the difficult choices now, who are prepared to rethink what success and security mean to them, may be the ones who find themselves feeling most secure in the life that comes next.

Not because they have everything figured out, but because they have stopped waiting for the old version of life to come back.

They are building something new.

And perhaps that is what spring is really about.

Not going back to what was, but allowing something new to grow.

So, as we leave winter behind, I am trying not to worry too much about having the whole road mapped out.

For now, I am taking it one day at a time, paying attention to what feels right, letting go of what doesn’t, and being grateful for the small things that are already here.

The birds don’t seem too worried about what the future holds.

They simply wake up each morning and get on with being birds.

Maybe there is something to be learned from that.

Here’s to spring, to new beginnings, and to giving ourselves permission to change our minds about what we thought our lives were supposed to look like.