Okay, does anyone else feel like they want a do over for 2020?
I know I do and I also know that is not the way it works, we don't get to go backward, we can only go forwards.
But, for a moment, I would like to reflect...
Starting with acknowledging that 2020 ran the gamut from being a huge disappointment for some, to an enormous challenge for many, and for others it was extremely destructive.
I personally experienced all of those and more...
For me, 2020 put my yoga practices to the test, where did the rubber meet the road and where did I spin out. It tested things like patience, allowing, acceptance, fluidity, resilience, endurance, kindness towards others, self-compassion, and more ...
And 2020 also created opportunities, like slowness and space, in which I could really begin to sense and see myself differently.
Those spaces revealed things like how my anxiety manifests, where my blindspots are, and it magnified how much of a creature of habit I am.
It taught me a lot about what I want as well as what I don't want for my life.
I discovered strength, creativity, and resourcefulness that I did not think I had.
It opened my eyes to new ways of being and offered me invaluable insights, life lessons, and spaces to grow into that I had not known about before.
From the slowness of my own life I could look out into the world and see all the different experiences that others were going through that were very similar to my experiences and others who were/are having vastly different experiences than mine. It is helping me put perspective to my place and privilege in the world, another gem of a lesson for me.
As 2020 drew to a close one thing I walked away with and am brining into 2021 is the ability to Begin Again...
We truly have the opportunity to begin again in any and every moment. But a "new year" holds a time, space, and opportunity to envision, plan, and begin again.
I don’t know if it is the end of the holidays, the bleak bareness of winter weather, or the alignment of the stars but there seems to be a potency during this time at the beginning of a calendar year to create a menu of visions, deepest hopes, and desires for ourselves, our lives, our relationships, and our work in the world. And perhaps even chart a course for that journey...
Many of us are holding hope that 2021 will be better than 2020. Hope that the world will begin to heal, in many ways — from the individual person to the collective world community from its health to its heart. Again, the individual and collective traumas of 2020 left many of us wanting and needing things to change. Now I admit, we don’t have control over changing many things in the world, — it’s been said, "I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples." — some of them, within our own lives especially, are within our reach. Whether you call them resolutions, intentions, sankalpas, or your "new groove", they do not take place on their own, with us sitting idly by on the sidelines hoping. Those changes require us to take action...
VISIONS & DECISIONS
But first we have to know what we want and what actions need to be taken.
That starts with going within...
GO INSIDE
Rilke said, “There is only one journey in this life, going inside.”
Inside is the place of fertile ground. It is the place and the space large enough, open enough, rich enough, and empty enough to be a place of creation... of the newness, change, and transformation that only happens when one makes time and space to pause, dream, envision, and plan.
Then there comes a time when one must turn back out into the world to proceed ...
TAKE ACTION
In the insightful, brilliant, and poetic text of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that he must take action. The idea that we can’t just simply just sit idly by and hope things will change, as Gandhi said, “We have to be the change we want to see in the world.”
Comments