Cold Water
Release • December 2025 / January 2026
THE PLUNGE
Every New Year’s Day in the Netherlands, thousands of people walk into the sea.
It is a party before it is a plunge. Music blares from speakers. People stretch and warm up, jumping jacks and nervous laughter, arms wrapped tight against the cold. And then the signal comes, and they run, shouting, stumbling, pushing toward the water. For a moment they are under. Then they surface, gasping, grinning, shaking from the shock of it.
The sky is usually a flat January gray. The air smells of salt and wet wool. The North Sea does not soften itself for ceremony.
The Dutch call it Nieuwjaarsduik. The New Year’s Dive. It has no spiritual origin, no formal liturgy, no doctrine. It is simply a thing people do together when one year ends and another begins. And yet something in the act speaks to an instinct older than any calendar.
What are they looking for, these thousands standing at the water’s edge?
Not endurance. The cold lasts only seconds.
Not spectacle. No one is watching who is not also shivering.
Not achievement. There is nothing to win.
They are looking, I think, for a feeling that is hard to find elsewhere: the sensation of being, for one clean instant, released.
It is not a new instinct. We have been stepping into water like this for a very long time.
THE ECHO
There is an older story about a man at a river.
He was not famous yet. He had built nothing, healed no one, delivered no sermon that anyone remembered. He was simply a man from a small town in an occupied country, approaching middle age, standing among strangers who had come to the water for reasons of their own.
A prophet was there, waist-deep in the Jordan, calling people forward. One by one they came. They confessed what burdened them. They went under. They came up. And then they walked back to their lives, not sinless, not perfected, but lighter.
When the man from the small town stepped into the water, the prophet hesitated. But the man went in anyway. Not to be cleansed, for he had nothing to confess, but to stand where everyone else stood. To begin not with a proclamation, but with submission. To enter public life the way the rest of us must: by getting wet.
The story does not say what that water felt like. But I imagine it was cold.
LAYING IT DOWN
January offers something rarer than a fresh plan. It offers release.
Not the erasure of memory. We cannot unlearn what we have learned. But relief from its weight. The past year may have taught us much. It may also have pressed down on us in ways we did not notice until we tried to stand.
There is a difference between remembering and carrying. Conscience asks us to be honest about who we have been. It does not ask us to drag every failure behind us like a sled through mud. Growth requires reckoning, yes. But it also requires mercy. We cannot move toward who we are becoming if we are forever tethered to who we were.
The cold water does not make anyone pure. It does not undo what was done. But it marks a line. It says: Here, something ended. Here, something else begins.
We do not step out of the river or sea as different people. We step out as the same people, still dripping, still imperfect, still cold, but no longer holding so tightly to what we were carrying on the way in.
That may be enough.
The year is new. The water is near. And whatever you have been dragging, whatever weight pressed down on you in the months behind you, you are allowed to set it down.
Not because you have earned release.
But because you need it.
As this year begins, what weight are you most ready to set down?
I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments. If this piece resonated, consider liking or sharing it with someone who might appreciate it.
Thank you for being here.