For list-makers, these past weeks have been a source of pleasure, satisfaction and confirmation.

We are bombarded with “the best of” this and “the worst of” that. There seems to be nothing the writers can’t put in a list at the end and beginning of each year. We are admonished incessantly about what we should expect in 2025. And none of it seems good.

Many of us anticipate Jan. 20 with concern and dread. How could the American people elect Donald Trump to a second term? But that’s their politics and their business, regardless of how the rest of the world anticipates the worst.

Contemplating the darkness about to descend on the North American political future leads me to ask: Where is the light?

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It came in a most unusual way — a Christmas letter that arrived just last week from my friend Heather Campbell, whose opinions I respect deeply. Heather is a professional engineer with a master of law degree. She focuses on energy transition, sustainability and inclusion.

She is an engaged, lifelong community volunteer, a board director with Calgary’s performing arts centre, Arts Commons, and a member of the advisory council for Western Engineering, her alma mater. She is an advisory council member of the B.C. Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy, and an advisory board member of the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program. She is the former co-chair of Alberta’s Anti-Racism Advisory Council and has been awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, the Calgary Black Chambers achievement award in energy, and the 2024 Harry Jerome Decade Leader Award.

She says the essence of 2024 was a continuous loop of light and darkness. But she also writes: “It hasn’t been a great year but it has been one where I navigated the darkness and light almost daily. I am stronger for having lived through all of it.

“We have to go into the darkness to experience the warmth and love in the light.”

Her optimism is a lesson for all of us.

She writes: “I’m always looking to the light these days, knowing darkness is surrounding all of us by the nature of world events . . . The uncertainty isn’t scary for me as long as I have a bit of light to shine in the darkness and the sun warms my face.”

We all make lists. I don’t know if Heather has channelled Hammurabi, who ruled Mesopotamia from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. He had 282 laws written on 12 tablets. He claimed they came from the god of justice. A millennium later, God as editor gave Moses 10 laws on two tablets.

Lists sell through curiosity and some mathematical chip in our brains that responds to numbers and alliteration. I’m convinced we are hardwired to respond to magic numbers, of which 10 leads the list.

But why take my word for it? Consider the theories of an expert, John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia and the author of Innumeracy.

Paulos writes that lists are complete stories. No matter how disjointed the subjects, lists have a beginning (1, 2, 3); a middle (4, 5, 6, 7); and an end (8, 9, 10). In fact, Paulos wrote his own Top 10 List of Lists, which included the fact that “10 is a common and familiar number, the base of our number system” and lists are a ritual. “Numbers are often associated with rites, and this is a perfect example.”

The late writer Irving Wallace, his wife, Sylvia, and their children, David Wallenchinsky and Amy Wallace, made a family career out of lists. In their first Book of Lists, they write that lists are as old written history.

Shakespeare made lists. In 1601, he wrote Hamlet, in which Polonius offers his son Laertes a list of pragmatic rules to live by. It included admonitions we sometimes forget are part of a list. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be . . . This above all: to thine own self be true.”

Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 Mikado featured Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, who had a “little list” of offenders “who never would be missed.”

For 2025, let’s make a list of things that bring us joy and shed light on our lives.

Catherine Ford is a regular columnist.

© Calgary Herald