December 31st, 2025
It started as an ordinary December morning on frozen Lake Mohawk in New Jersey. Sunkiss, a labrador retriever, was doing what dogs do when snow covers the world: she was playing with her friend Bruno. They chased each other across the ice, two dogs lost in the joy of a cold morning.
Then the ice spoke back.
One moment Sunkiss was running. The next, she was falling through a crack that opened like a trapdoor, swallowing her into water so cold it stopped her breath. She surfaced, clawing at the edge, but the ice broke away in her paws. She paddled desperately, eyes wide, nostrils flaring between gulps of frozen lake.
Someone saw what happened and called 911. Patrolman Michael Poon heard the dispatch that would define his afternoon: dog through the ice, Lake Mohawk, still alive.
When Poon arrived, he could see the lab’s dark head bobbing in the icy water, getting smaller, getting tired. The ice between them was a minefield. Every step toward her could send him into the same freezing trap.
He didn't hesitate.
Poon pulled on the department's ice rescue suit, clipped a tether to his belt, and dropped to his hands and knees. He crawled, distributing his weight across ice that groaned beneath him, each foot of progress a calculated gamble. Behind him, fellow officers fed out rope, ready to haul him back if the lake tried to claim two lives instead of one.
Sunkiss saw him coming. She panicked, swimming away from this strange figure in fluorescent gear, too frightened to understand the difference between help and harm. Poon reached the edge of the hole, saw the terror in her eyes, and made a decision: he slipped into the water with her.
The cold hit like frigid bullets. His hands finally found her collar, and with strength he'd later say he didn't know he had, he heaved Sunkiss onto solid ice. She scrambled, slipped, found her footing, and limped toward the shore on legs that barely held her.
Minutes later, she was wrapped in blankets in the back of a patrol car, heat blasting, shivering against strangers who'd become her world. When her owner arrived, Sunkiss looked up, tail thumping weakly, as if to say: I'm still here. I don't know how, but I'm still here.
The bodycam footage went viral. Millions watched. Comments piled up: hero, amazing, faith in humanity restored. But here's what the cameras didn't capture, the moment before Poon crawled onto that ice, when he made a choice that no algorithm recorded.
He could have calculated the risk and called it too high. No one would have blamed him. The dog wasn't his. The ice wasn't safe. The water was deadly cold.
But when that moment of decision arrived, something in him turned outward instead of inward. It defined the difference between selfless and selfish. And that made all the difference.
I thought a lot about what I wanted to write to begin the new year, a time when dreams are imagined, goals defined, and resolutions set. Lose weight. Make money. Exercise more. All fine goals. But all turned inward. All for ourselves.
But there is another kind of resolution. One we decide now, in advance, to execute on when the moment unexpectedly arrives, when there is no time to analyze, no time to consider and decide.
Yes, there may be risk. It may cost money. At a minimum, it will involve time. The questions to answer now:
Which direction will you take?
What kind of heart will you bring to that moment?
What will you do when only the one who needs you is watching?
Will your heart turn inward, or outward?
