WELCOME 2026!

I hope that every one of you had a good New Year’s Eve and a fun, or at least pleasant, New Year’s Day. I thank all the people who wished me the best.

Now, let’s get down to my special thoughts for 2026.

For my first column of 2024, (so two years ago,) I suggested that we all practice kindness for the next twelve months, which I hope that most of us did. (I did, but I always have for my whole life; I can’t fathom why so many others don’t.) I’m hoping that continues for eternity for all of us.

And now I have a new suggestion for 2026.

And that is that we all make a habit of positivity. While not discarding kindness, of course. But being positive is actually being kind to ourselves, which we often forget to do. I promise you—just a few short deep breaths while thinking “positivity,” and then exhaling “negativity,” really help calm you down. If it works for worrywart moi, it will work for anybody!

I’ve long believed in positivity, but until I heard an athlete talking about it during the Summer Olympics last year, I never applied it like I do now. As you may know, I watch just about every second of Olympics TV coverage, and one night, Long Jump Champion Tara Davis-Woodhall was explaining how she’s able to keep calm and focus in front of all those people when she’s competing on that highest of levels. What she said has helped me immensely since then, especially in our country’s very trying times in the past year. She said that she “breathes in positivity and breathes out negativity.” And then she won the gold a few days later! Ever since then, I do it three times in a row several times a day, especially when I’m stressing about something. And I’m a believer, both in positivity and Tara!

Here’s one little personal story about how positivity works, even before I started doing it myself: About ten years ago, my best friend at the time, Alice, and I were at the opening of a show, which, in an unusual move, had the opening night party before the show instead of after. It was fabulous.

The actual packaged ice cream cones from the party. Photo by Karen Salkin.

After a while, we were both totally full from the hot dogs, but we each took a packaged ice cream cone, (meaning in a wrapper,) out to the patio, near where we were parked, to eat them. And all of a sudden, we both realized that we were stuffed to the gills, and didn’t want to eat any more. But obviously, we couldn’t put the cones back into gen pop after we had them in our possession. So Alice said not to worry about it, that she would go out to the car, put them in the trunk, and we’d eat them after the show.

So I shockingly queried, “You’re going to put ice cream in the trunk of your car and think it’s not going to melt in the next three hours???” But she told me to stop being negative; she said to just be positive, and it would work out.

And I still can’t believe it to this day, but those cones did not melt! At all! They were still perfect after the show! That’s when I really started believing in the power of positive thinking.

So that’s my big beginning-of-the-year tip! I hope it helps.

And Happy 2026! I’m optimistic that together, we can make life work.