2020 gotcha like?
2020 vision; It’s almost too easy to use that term this year but boy does it feel appropriate. Just over a year ago I was spending time writing copy to officially launch my coaching business and everything had the hashtag of #2020vision attached. My goal was to welcome the year 2020 with arms wide open, to finally give myself permission to let the coaching thing I’d been playing with become more intentional and give that whole business wings. I myself had been coached for years and could directly correlate the awesome breakthroughs I experienced to these weekly meetings. I saw my wellness business grow in leaps and bounds, my personal life become more peaceful and found myself growing in ways I hadn’t considered before. When my family decided to travel for three months in an RV I attached more fully to this concept of sharing out all the awesome nuggets of knowledge I had gleaned in years of coaching and started to turn the mentorship I was already giving in business to another level. I practiced with some friends and colleagues and found my flow and got up the chutzpah to strap shoes on this baby. After my third daughter was born I had so much clarity about the way I wanted to create and how through my writing and coaching I could bring healing to small pockets of people in the world. As 2019 tipped into 2020 I was ablaze with confidence and energy.
I hired the web designer and got the photos done, I edited and rewrote my copy ready to promote. I hired a nanny to take care of Edie while the big girls were in school and I put the finishing touches on a program about an “Ideal Life Experiment™” {just kidding, I didn’t really trademark that, just don’t steal it from me, k?} to launch in April 2020. I was going to rely on my witty writing abilities and let people know that if 2020 started a bit rocky that they didn’t need to worry, something like 80% of people fail miserably at their annual goals and resolutions by just the third week of January. Because that’s where I come in, with this program, my badass coaching skills and the resources you need to pick yourself up, brush yourself off and tuck into the true essence of what you want to become. Your highest purpose. Your divine self. I even recorded an Ideal Day meditation and rented a podcast studio to start working on a long held dream I had.
Enter March 2020 and I don’t need to tell you what happened because here we are 10 months later and lo and behold it’s still kinda shitty. In some ways better and in some ways much worse. Besides wanting to yell FUCK as loudly as I could as everything I just spent months creating slipped away — the copy now sounding entirely too chipper, the notion of an “ideal” life laughable when our reality just turned completely upside down, the finally attained nanny sadly not materializing — I felt emptied of ideas of how to move forward. Actually that’s not true; my brain and my notebook and my computer and many scraps of paper are chock full of ideas…for programs, coaching packages, books, blogs, podcasts, healing platforms, retreats, intentional living communities… The ideas didn’t die away but the surety and the confidence did. Damn, that felt like a blow.
What I do know is that we’re all experiencing something so unprecedented (anyone else tired of that word? Lump it in with bubble, social distancing and contact tracing – barf) which has at times devastated us. Perhaps it was our health that suffered, our income, our family wellbeing, our relationships or just our general faith in humanity. There is no fully happy outcome of this time, unless perhaps you happen to own Amazon or some other business that’s dealing in the trillions after capitalizing off of the shit show this year has become, but I digress. I haven’t changed my outlook in case you wondered, though I’m not all heated up like I was for a good few months there, I still believe we’re locked into a charade based on false information for nefarious reasons that we’ll maybe never fully understand, the difference is I no longer feel compelled to ‘wake someone up’ knowing that it’s not actually my business what you may believe. But I hope even if you don’t agree with me you’ll keep reading. Because, as is my nature, I’m about to silver-lining the shizzz out of this bizarre year. Let’s get to the good stuff.
Firstly might I suggest that perhaps our notion of happiness is delusional. I don’t say this lightly, as someone who spends a very good deal of my time forcing my energy to the positive it’s only this year I’ve really started to question the foundations there. We’ve maybe been mislead to believe that all of life should always be good no matter what, and to our detriment. Not allowing the natural flow of emotions to help guide us, not being able to better empathize with our fellow humans when things are just really hard, always slapping a happy face on when actually things just feel tough — I think it’s all rooted in a space of wanting everyone to be okay but sometimes being okay looks like also being a bit sad, a bit lost, a bit disappointed, a bit angry. It’s not that we can’t find and emulate happiness, but that we’ve been lead to believe it has to look a certain way. Perhaps happiness is only going to be found in those small moments, unreasonable joy I like to call it, in the crying baby, the burst pipes, the empty bank account, spaghetti for dinner for the 8th time in a row. Those are all part and parcel of life and so when we can experience them and recognize the struggle and yet be happy anyway we actually experience life fully. It’s not glossing over the bad or pretending the challenges don’t exist, it’s realizing that those are all part of the complexities of being human and celebrating life anyway.
2020 vision is thought of as the ability to see with clear eyes but often this is in review, a perspective gained only in looking back. The power is in harnessing that ability at all times, not just in retrospect. How can we look at our now situation with more compassion, more grace, more gratitude? Maybe it’s only there when you stop gritting your teeth long enough to see what’s happened in these few months that was for your benefit.
Was it the gift of time – maybe you were among the lucky souls who got paid to stay in the comfort of your home hopping onto the odd Zoom call, wearing a dress shirt up top and ragged sweatpants on the bottom. Besides finding creative ways to stay looking like you care about the virtual meeting you were plugged into, did you happen to do something else with that time? I know many people who started cooking again, from scratch, realized they quite like having the control of the quality of ingredients, the smell of cooking whetting their appetites. Did you garden, maybe for the first time ever? And delight in the slow but steady growth of that first sweet cucumber, its curled tendrils so vibrant and alive. Maybe you got some chickens and felt an inordinate sense of productivity as those first eggs popped out and then again each and every day your sweet hen provided for you. Perhaps a new pet graced your life, a floppy eared pup or sharp clawed kitten, and you reignited the feeling of connection when human physical touch was somehow unauthorized. A new job, or a hobby, might have found its way in your life, fuelling the desire to create and learn and expand. Maybe just getting out each day for a walk, finding that you were seeing the same old route through different eyes, popping up pics of the waterfront or the gardens or the doors on houses onto your social account. Just the adoption of slowing down the pace of life, seeing how much time you normally spent rushing from one thing to the next, maybe just enjoying the warmth of your coffee without the to-go cup and the commute.
Was it the shift in perception around your current surroundings – I’m a firm believer that our environment is majorly impactful on us, not just the physical space and its contents but its energy and the people within it (hello essential oils, this is why I go through bottle after bottle of mildly mood altering aromas each month!!). With 2020 vision you may have started to see that the toxic relationship you had with your partner was actually beyond repair and life wasn’t meant to be wasted for one more second in that state of unhappiness. Or perhaps you finally realized that they weren’t actually ever the issue and as you did some deeper inner work you came to see them as the true love of your life. Maybe dates at home helped you see that the restaurant and the bar and the extra couples all just distracted you from learning who this partner of yours really is. In the absence of play dates, extracurriculars and cramming activity into every minute of every day you might have learned that those kids you created are actually some damn fine humans. Or maybe friendships deepened or fell apart but you were able to see that either way it was for your highest good as you became a more sincere version of yourself.
Was it in an unexpected turn of events – maybe when your calendar was cleared for you something that you could never have planned for came along – we truly thought we’d be spending this Christmas on a beach in Costa Rica but our plan to relocate there for a year was thwarted. Would I have imagined being in this 200 year old limestone house on over 100 acres? No beach in sight but there is a decent rink organically formed by the torrential downpour on Christmas Day behind the barns. We have a propensity to over-plan, myself included, and when things veer off course it can feel disorientating. I didn’t plan to not have my kids in school or to be living at an old farmhouse or to feel shackled to Kingston just when I thought it was time to spread my wings. And yet here I am! Were your plans completely ruined only to reveal something else that actually is just as sweet?
Was it simply in the pause itself – maybe the biggest lesson we learned in this ‘pandemic’ is that we are living at a pace that is simply not sustainable. It isn’t natural to just go go go, to always strive, to always look to succeed, to gain one material thing only to turn around and start hunting for the next consumable. Or perhaps it is so rooted in our human nature and yet without that biological needs to hunt, to be nomadic, to survive we turn each cushy day into its own game of survival unnecessarily? At the beginning of this weird time, in March, once people recognized that it was ‘safe’ to come outside and go for walks and before the mandates to cover your face what I saw was families by the dozens simply going for walks. Distanced from anyone else on their path of course as the time called for but looking at their fellow neighbour also on their daily walk and beaming a smile to one another. Not just smiling with a closed mouth but teeth exposed, eyes crinkled, whole face SMILING. In joy, in the easy joy of feeling winter melt into spring, of feeling the connection of their family as they do something as simple as walk alongside one another. The pause this year offered was a massive gift for many who had been running at such a high pace they were just about falling over in exhaustion.
Was it in recognizing the web of humanity – though this year could be described as the most alienating, the most divisive it could also be argued that it really helped us see our oneness. Though I disagree with why we have globally united it cannot be overlooked how staggeringly wondrous it is that all far flung corners of the globe are truly acting as one, with the same set of beliefs and the same mission. There is immense power in our oneness and if we could also put that power forth in prayer, or in kindness, or in love, or in planetary protection, or in a desire to truly shift the path that we’re on – WOW. Did you find more connection? Were you brought to your knees by the massive capacity we have to simply change course AS ONE and put something new into action?
I’m not actually sure 2021 will be “better”. I know there is much chatter of how we are leaving 2020 behind and with it the dramatic turn of events it has brought. But the storyline hasn’t changed in fact has really just become more involved, the unbelievable events seem to be only taking on more traction as they steamroll their way forward (until we say stop, ahem). As an idealist I want to go full-bore into creating my reality through my perception and belief, and my entrepreneurial spirit makes me want to share that process. 2020 allowed me to get crystal clear on who I am as a person and notice more of how I’ve allowed myself to be swayed by external pressures to be more, have more, do more. To know myself, to live in my truth, to live a life that is an expression of love, of joy, of pleasure. Could it be so simple? Perhaps, it’s definitely what I want to explore more of. I’ve been off social media for two weeks which is liberating but also confusing. Is it possible to build my business off social? Can I still feel connected without it? I’m navigating what the next while will look like and determining my moves as I go. I want to build community and I want it to feel safe and distraction-free, which are the two major bones of contention I hold with how our current model for social media goes. We’ve been so distracted – ANYTHING that takes us away from love, from connection, from truth is simply a form of distraction. Whether it was intentional or not this year allowed us a glimpse of that as we felt the quieting effect of the globe shutting down as one.
2020 vision is clear, it is vivid and many are experiencing it for the first time. We were invited to see the world with perhaps not new eyes but a new perspective, one that is more based in the slowness of nature, the acceptance that life is finite and that experiences are fleeting and constantly evolving. You’ve just been given the ultimate level of choice; as we move into a new calendar year we get to keep choosing where our focus goes, where our belief lies. We are consciously creating what comes next and we see that in a clearer way now. I am grateful to move forward to this next phase and I’m honoured to have you walk the journey with me. I’m excited to see what we create together and for a new way of connecting that I’m pooling my energy and intention toward. May you end this year with consciousness, with appreciation for what was gained, acknowledgement of what was lost and tenderness for yourself and others.