Hello AOSW members! This is my last message to you all as President and before I turn the reins over to the capable leadership of our next President, Ali Sachs!  

It is this time of year when we review what we have done and where we traveled in the last year, and map out where we are going in the new year ahead. It is a time for resolutions, reflection and reunions with colleagues, family and friends. 

In these messages I have not intermingled external world events with that of the crisis-laden world in our day-to-day work. The emergency of a cancer diagnosis can take up our emotional lives as much as it does those of our patients and families. Consequently, burn out and compassion fatigue are well documented and deeply felt by us all at some point(s) in our professional lives. Because of this intensity, working in a crisis-oriented field can obscure the ways the world can interact with our clinical world. I notice this for myself sometimes when I look at or read the news and think, “I gave at the office,” and turn the page, so to speak, on the issues of the day. I think I am unplugging but I am really disconnecting.

This last year was a confusing picture of advances in some areas while there were deeply disturbing crisis in others—an increase in racial and gun violence contributing to too many lost lives, masses of people displaced by endless conflicts and war, limits on women’s rights worldwide, an increase in global poverty and destructive natural disasters. Though these seem disparate national and global trends, they do impact us as clinicians, as advocates and as humans who are not just in the business of helping others but are passionate about their quality of survival. These events can challenge our sense of hope, of connectedness and our belief systems.

So in this last message to you all, and during this time of reflection and reunion, I encourage you to reach out beyond your immediate worlds into the chaotic, messy one that is swirling around us, and not just take in the images of despair but take action against them. We should follow our own very sound advice that we give our patients and families—the more active a participant you are in your treatment, the better the outcome. We give that advice because we learned from research that people who are active in their treatments (through question asking and information seeking) have less severe symptoms and experience a better quality of life.

So what do I mean by “active?” It can be as simple as talking about what is happening in our world(s) with friends and how it impacts you, making contributions to organizations that are doing work that is consistent with your values, volunteering your time and effort to those same organizations, voting in primaries and general elections, getting your friends and families to vote as well and anything else you can think of that initiates positive energy and action into the world.

When E.M. Forster wrote “Only Connect” as a preface to the novel Howard’s End, he was referring primarily to class disparities in turn-of-the century England. Howard’s End was written during a similar time of global change in pre-WWI Europe. This simple statement still has resonance today where the more we remember to “only connect,” the less detached we will be from one another and ultimately ourselves.