Down here in NZ, the swans are black. I’d never seen their little cygnets till today… they’re light gray. I suppose that might help them hide from hawks.

When I first learned the term ‘black swan’ it meant a rare and unpredictable and consequential event… like everybody in the Euro-colonial world until 1697, I didn’t know black swans actually existed. News in this case traveled slowly.

Then it came to mean a quite chilling movie.

But now, well, it’s just a swan… that happens to be black. Or is it?

As 2025 comes to an end, I’m living in New Zealand! All manner of black swans… things I couldn’t possibly have predicted… pop into my life every day. They’ve been mostly positive. From my point of view, those daily surprises can be consequential in the same way that big external events are important at a different scale.

There’s plenty of ‘unprecedented’ floating around at the macro level, and I’d be ok with fewer of those black swans. But here on the home front, bring it on! Let’s see what 2026 has in store for us!