Following a practice I’ve been doing for the past 17 years (see list), my first post of 2026 across all my sites is of three words that are my aspirations or “themes” for the year ahead. They are not “resolutions” so much as guiding thoughts or principles.

This year they are a re-ordered version of last year’s words: Health, Resilience, and Hope.

Health

This is my perennial theme… but I MUST make some changes this year and prioritize my health. I’m 14 pounds heavier than I was one year ago, and my blood pressure has been inching up more. If I want to be around long term, I’ve GOT to make some changes!

Resilience

As I talked about last year, “resilience” is a theme coming up in both my personal life and through the work I do at the Internet Society. Expect me to write more about this on various different levels.

Hope

As bleak or chaotic as things may be, I think we must choose hope “as a daily, gritty act of resistance and resilience”. There are people working on ideas and solutions for many challenges we have. There are people working to blunt the impact of extreme policies. We need to celebrate and support this work – and do more ourselves. That is MY continued goal for this year, as it was last year – to keep highlighting these hopeful stories, and to create some of my own as well.

These are my themes for 2026.. let’s see what happens!

A Note About My Writing

You’ll notice that I did NOT write any other posts on this DanYork.com site since last January. And if you look at my danyork.me aggregator site, you’ll see that I really didn’t write anywhere else, either!

For most of 2025, my role at the Internet Society was supporting our President and CEO, with first her communications and then since May 2025 as her Chief of Staff. The role was very intense and left me little time to do other writing – but even more so I was very aware of my close proximity to the CEO, and I didn’t want any of my writing to potentially reflect back on our CEO. I didn’t want anything I wrote personally to be viewed as potentially coming from our CEO or reflecting her views.

To minimize any potential confusion, I chose to go silent and not publish personal blog posts, podcast episodes, newsletters, or anything else. I was never asked to do this by our CEO or anyone else, and I don’t know if anyone there even noticed. I just felt it was best for me in my role.

That role is now changing as I go into 2026. I’m moving into a different role heading up a new project. We will be hiring a new Chief of Staff, and that person will be taking over the duties I had with our CEO. And so with all the changes, I feel that I can resume the writing and other content creation that I used to do. So you should see more writing from me in the months ahead!