I'm encouraging you to act on it before the end of the year. For the biggest impact, do it in writing. And do it for somebody who knows you have nothing to gain. It's important to give encouragement to family and friends, but their happiness and yours are inseparable. And remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness.
Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.
We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were the most important, into that more difficult time when it is a person's duty to understand the world rather than simply fight for it. There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid systems appear. It's like being between trapezes.