The Year the Threads Converged

Some years you build. Some years you plant. Some years you harvest.

This year, something different happened. The threads I'd been weaving for decades—professional, personal, spiritual—finally found their loom.

The Ground Beneath

This year brought a quiet clarity—not the kind you chase, but the kind that finds you when you've stopped running.

The meditation practice that started as discipline has become necessity. Early mornings in the dark before the world wakes up. Learning, still, how to be present. How to listen. How to sit with what's uncomfortable without running.

The divorce that had been pending for years finding its resolution. Amicable. Respectful. Harder than it looks from the outside. But we’re finishing that chapter with dignity—for us, and especially for our daughter.

She's fifteen now. Her theater and music have taken a back seat to athletics—year-round track and soccer, early morning trainings, long road trips. She competes to win, but moves like the artist and dancer she's always been. Fierce and composed. Like wind with intention. She doesn't want to hang with her old man much these days—that's the deal at fifteen—but I'm grateful for the time we do get. The simple times. The quiet drives. Watching her become who she's becoming.

This is the ground everything else stands on.

The Professional Crescendo

It started with a question none of us had asked before: If we could imagine the future of the supply chain—not fix what's broken, but build what's possible—what would we create?

Supply Chain of the Future grew from that imaginative act into a movement. Three hundred companies across five continents. Not because we pitched it. Because they recognized themselves in it.

From the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade Committee in Geneva to ASTM Committee sessions and policy framing in DC. From the state of industry breakfast in Anaheim to closed-door retailer conversations where guards came down and sticky notes flew. The momentum wasn't manufactured—it was released.

We stood in front of industry leaders and said: We're not building this for you. We're building it with you.

They believed us. Because we meant it.

The Global Show in October became proof of concept. Industry-built ROI calculators. Shelf-life prediction models. Smart data escrow demonstrations. Not PowerPoints about future possibilities—actual tools people could build with.

And now: Fruit Logistica Berlin on the horizon. The Consumer Goods Forum partnership crystallizing. The Global Sustainability Framework finding its voice. ASTM standards moving from proposal to execution.

The things we've been working on—supply chain sovereignty, sustainability, innovation in packaging, food safety, human-centered design that serves the greater good—they're landing. The societal impact is real.

But here's the thing about work: it's meaningful because of who you do it with and who you come home to. Not the other way around.

The Relationships

This was a year of learning what I'm made of.

Some relationships deepened. The colleagues who've been dreaming and conspiring alongside me for years, building frameworks that are finally bearing fruit. The friends who've been in the trenches—who've listened to my ideas and my doubts, who've pushed back when I needed it and held space when I needed that instead.

Some relationships found closure. The ones that taught me the most about myself—including the parts I didn't want to see. I'm grateful for what was shared, even when the ending was hard. Especially then.

To those who loved me deeply: I see it now in ways I couldn't before. Your strength. Your patience. The ways you held on and the wisdom in your letting go.

To those who spoke hard truths when it would've been easier not to: thank you. The growth happened because you cared enough to be honest.

To those with whom I share the best memories of my life, even as our season together has passed: those memories are treasures. They always will be.

And to those still walking alongside—you know who you are. The heart wants what it wants. Sometimes what it wants is simply to be known. To offer something of yourself and have it received. To matter.

You do.

The Writing

When I sat under desert stars watching Perseid meteors streak across the sky, I didn't know I was about to reframe what I’ve been building all along.

Desert Starlight became six articles exploring how contemplative approaches enhance technical precision. The sacred pause. Multiple frameworks applied to single phenomena. The geometry of wonder.

This built on what the Alps series started—that time in Switzerland where I watched complex systems operate in perfect trust, where navigation happened without collision, and understood something fundamental about infrastructure built on voluntary cooperation rather than enforcement.

Those insights resonated far beyond supply chains. They echoed in relationships. In leadership. In the way we build—or fail to build—the conditions for connection.

Then came something I didn't expect to write.

Deep Water: Four books about attachment, about patterns, about decades as one kind of partner and then becoming another. About the difference between earned knowledge and acquired knowledge. Writing under a different name felt right. Some truths need their own container.

The writing wasn't separate from the work—professional or personal. It was the work, seen from a different angle. The same questions, refracted through different lenses.

The Adventures

Time in Switzerland this summer. Mountains that make you feel small in the best way. Complex systems operating with elegant precision. Conversations with remarkable people that I'll carry forever.

Desert nights watching meteor showers. Laying on my back counting shooting stars, thinking about how ancient that light is. How brief we are. How that brevity is what makes everything precious.

The van is still ready. The mountains aren't going anywhere. More adventures ahead.

The Team and The Tribe

This year the team is expanding—both in headcount and in what became possible together.

New talent joining in the new year: community engagement, business administration, strategic development. Each role is designed to scale what we've built. Each person brings energy and perspective we didn't have before.

And the colleagues who've been in the trenches for years—the technologists, the strategists, the partners who saw where this was headed before the rest of the world caught up. What we've been working toward is becoming real. Not someday. Now.

The allied associations. The standards organizations. The industry councils. This year felt like watching a constellation come into focus. Individual points of light we'd been cultivating for years suddenly revealed their pattern.

Some colleagues are moving into new seasons of their careers and lives. They'll be missed. But always remembered.

We talk about voluntary cooperation in our industry work. Turns out we've been living it all along.

The Gratitude

Here's what I know after a year like this one:

None of it happens alone.

My daughter. Everything else is context. She's the point.

The friends who stayed close. Who answered late-night texts about strategy and sent early-morning messages about life. Who let me think out loud. Who didn't need me to be finished to keep showing up.

The family. Blood and chosen. Near and far. The ones who've known me longest and love me anyway.

The colleagues who became friends. The work is better because of you. But more importantly, my life is better because of you.

The industry leaders who said yes before it was safe to. The standards organizations who saw the vision. The technology partners who built the tools. The steering committee members who showed up month after month.

The hard lessons. The mirrors I didn't want to look into. The feedback that stung. The growth that only came through difficulty.

The faith. Still learning how to live what I believe. Still showing up to the practice. Still trusting that the path unfolds even when I can't see where it's going.

And the ones I haven't named specifically—because some acknowledgments are meant to be felt more than spoken.

You.

What's Ahead

February brings Berlin and the global expansion of everything we've built. Spring brings data symposiums and technical deep-dives. Summer brings pilots that prove the concepts scale. But that's the work calendar. Here's the real list:

More presence. Less proving.

More patience. The mountains taught me that breakthrough thinking requires stepping away from productive optimization. The desert taught me that multiple valid frameworks can illuminate the same reality from different angles.

More integration. The professional insights feeding the personal growth feeding the writing feeding the relationships feeding the work. Letting the different parts of life inform each other instead of keeping them in separate boxes.

More trust. Trust in the process. Trust in the people. Trust in the unfolding.

More time with people I love. More adventures. More conversations that matter.

One Last Thing

Under the desert stars, watching ancient stardust burn through the atmosphere, I practiced something profound: engaging the same phenomena through completely different frameworks.

Technical lens. Systems lens. Innovation lens. Spiritual lens.

Each unlocked different insights.

That's what this year was. The same life, seen through multiple lenses. Professional success and personal transformation. Industry leadership and internal growth. Public achievement and private becoming. Father. Friend. Leader. Student. Believer. Doubter.

All of it true at once.

2025 wasn't about arriving somewhere.

It was about understanding that the journey is the destination. That becoming never stops. That the threads don't converge to a final point—they create an ongoing weave. That the people you love and the people who love you—that's the whole point.

And the weave continues.

Here's to 2026. Here's to the work. Here's to the people who make both meaningful.

Grateful, 

~ Drew

December 2025 Wenatchee, WA