Onward into 2025: A journalist's musings

In a few days we’ll begin 2025 – a year my 18-year-old self couldn’t fathom 25 years ago. We watched the clock tick down in the year 1999 with bated breath to see if the computer systems would go down and the world would end when everything shifted from the 1900s into 2000. No, I really wasn’t nervous about Y2K. After all, I was an 18-year-old kid spending her first New Year’s Eve as an independent college student who could stay up as late as she wanted. Spoiler alert: everything was fine and the world did not implode. Well, somewhat.

Here we are 25 years into the 21st century, and we’ve finished a whole year with Allen Stock not in this world, and since then we’ve lost two more of North Dakota’s legacy newspapermen.

Tony Bender, the publisher of the Ashley Tribune and Wishek Star in south central North Dakota, as well as a columnist for Forum News Service until about a month prior, passed away on Nov. 25. Then word came yesterday that Lyle Van Camp, former publisher of the Valley News & Views of Drayton, passed away five days before Christmas.

“Left wing, right wing; it takes both for the eagle to fly,” Bender wrote in his farewell column for Forum Service on Oct. 30. May you fly high, Mr. Bender!

A couple of weeks ago the Carrington community also lost a frequent writer. Although I only published a few of his letters, Melvin Schramm was well known by locals for his commentary that appeared on the Independent opinion page many times during the Stock era.

Yes, we are losing voices in North Dakota, and it’s time those of us in the next generation start sharing ours more. There’s so much noise and so many channels for people to release their thoughts that sometimes it feels daunting to write something impactful.

To clear my head during this chaotic Christmas season, I booked a “Silent Night Stretch and Release” class with Lisa Weninger, a local reflexologist and yoga instructor. The class was at 4 p.m. on Sunday. I skipped the Vikings game and slogged out of my pajamas to make the short trip to Carrington, and it was well worth the effort.

Lisa is my new favorite person. After an hour in one of her classes, my shoulders were less tense and the pounding headache I had before class melted away. I was in such a calm state of mind that I didn’t want to ruin it by doing any actual work for the rest of the night.

I did manage to get my laundry done and supper made, but we all needed to eat and I figured I should probably wear clothes to work on Christmas Eve.

We learned that our bodies respond to stress in many ways, both emotionally and physically. She shared some simple stretches and breathing exercises we can do to manage stress in our lives.

My exercise that resonated the most for me was the heavy sighing breath. We were instructed to breathe in deep and then let it all out in a loud sigh. I discovered that every time I let out a loud sigh at work that it’s perfectly healthy and can be quite effective at relieving tension in the body so you don’t explode. You’re welcome, staff members!

Lisa also talked about the therapeutic power of journaling, with a fun twist. She asked us to write down some things that have caused us stress, identify the physical responses in our body related to those self-defeating thoughts, and then take the paper home and burn it! “Burn what no longer serves us,” she said.

This space in the newspaper is my journal of sorts. Although it must be heavily edited to make it suitable for public consumption much of the time, writing it gives me an opportunity to release what’s taking up space in my head.

Rather than burning what doesn’t sound right or shouldn’t ever be seen by others, I profusely “edit” my words by deleting them off the page. The Google docs app is a beautiful thing. I can type what I really think, sit with it for a moment or a day, then delete it and move on.

That said, I think I might want to try Lisa’s technique and put flame to words that no longer serve me.

That reminds me of a cartoon I ran in the Transcript a few weeks ago about President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency. It was the most humorous illustration I could never have come up with – Ramaswamy and Musk as minions with a pile of dynamite.

I’ve also been reading about the commutations and pardons from President Biden, which included all but three prisoners on federal death row. Most of them were murderers, so apparently if you kill multiple people in a church you are less worthy of forgiveness from Biden than if you only killed your mother or brother. He also commuted the sentences of thousands of people who were on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic, including a man from Leeds, N.D. who bilked farmers out of millions. Details in this week’s Transcript.

Yes, maybe I should have burned this column, or at least deleted most of it and demanded a rewrite. Then again, it’s Christmas Eve and I have a paper going to press in less than four hours.

So, we herald on into the year 2025. I’m going to put 2024 to bed and hope that I don’t wake up in 2025 with too big of a headache. If it’s not manageable, I’ll book another class with Lisa.

May you burn this newspaper to light your way into the new year, one that I hope is warmer and brighter for you than the one we are leaving behind.

P.S. Let’s forge a new path. I’m looking for readers who want to help shape this opinion page in the next year. Are you one of those people? Write me a letter and tell me to read it and then burn it. Or better yet, ask me to publish it and see what happens.