2020: The year of hidden gifts?

I believe that most of life is dedicated to learning. If we are lucky, we have opportunities to learn gentler lessons. If we are unlucky, or avoid/ ignore/ do not learn from the gentle ones, then we are eventually left to learn from the painful lessons. We all have had a cut we did not properly clean. Because we did not take the few extra moments to properly clean it initially, the cut got infected and became a much larger and painful problem.

Most people enter therapy after many missed gentler lessons. I know that my second stint in therapy came after  the realization, “I cannot go another day like this. I will do anything not to feel this way anymore.”

Is it just me, or has this been 2020 in a nut shell for the world?

Pain brings growth or death. With the pile-on of grief, pain, uncertainty  and general discomfort over the past months, we are left with an ever looming choice:
Continue to ignore/ distract/ avoid -or- Look within and Grow.

So many of us have already had realizations in these months of COVID quarantining. Some of us cannot see family. Some of us cannot get away from family. Being stuck at home has led most of us to see all the ways we were so easily able to distract and avoid by staying busy: Busy for partners, friends and family, busy for work, busy running errands; busy out of necessity. …But, then the definition of necessity changed almost overnight.

Since mid March, we had already been forced to sit more still and silent than we have for decades to look within.

I have no control over this. How can I feel in control? What is really important to me? Who is really important to me?  What was I avoiding? What am I still avoiding? How do I healthily cope now that I lost most of my old ways of coping??

This past week seems to be another awakening point.

For many of us, the light is now shining on the outside world brighter than it has before. We are being given a gift to see what has always been lying just under the surface and in the shadows not even out of sight.

What do I value? What do I believe (in)? What am I willing to stand up for? What could I even do??

There continues to be so much uncertainty with the future of our daily lives, nation and world. When will this end? Will life ever go back to how it used to be? Do I want it to? Should it ever go back to how it was before? Can I even go back to how I used to be?

I say often, Fear always wants to be fed. All we can do is learn to feed it less.

Change is always scary. This is why feeding fear is our default: so we do not have to change, so we can feel in control at the cost of staying stuck.

COVID-19 and the shining of light onto the realities of inequality just for being a person of color in the US is no longer going to allow us to avoid/ distract/ deny. Even if we wanted to, I do not think, and truly hope we cannot trick ourselves into staying stuck any longer.

For those of us lucky enough to not have known what was always there, are we ready to heed the gentler lesson?

There is no simple answer or fix to our Inside World and Outside World problems. But sitting still long enough to hear and answer the questions our bodies and minds are asking us as we continue to be stuck at home, uncomfortable and irritable will allow us to begin to grow into a healthier individual and member of our community.