In celebration of my 46 years on this earth, my youngest and I were enjoying breakfast with just the two of us and we started to reflect on things we have learned in the past year. It caused me to pause and really think about what I had learned through the craziness of the past year. Today, I’m sharing my top 3 learnings with you:
Acceptance
Acceptance isn’t about indulging in victimization or not taking control of your life and creating your dreams. It is about not fighting reality by telling yourself things shouldn’t be the way they are in the present as they are happening. It means accepting that sometimes your days don’t play out like they should…like when your child texts to say he’s locked in the school gym because a girl pulled a knife out at lunch but everyone is OK, or the community you worked so hard to build at the gym is not allowed to sweat together in person for so long that half over half of them have moved on to other things. You accept the reality that is and refocus your efforts on what you CAN do right now with the reality that exists. It also doesn’t mean that you force a positive spin on a negative situation. When bad things happen, a negative emotion is appropriate. Acceptance is the difference towards allowing yourself to feel so you can process and move on instead of indulging in the emotion long term.
Resilience & Courage
My oldest should write a book on this one someday because I have learned more about overcoming difficulty from him than anyone in my life. So many of us grew up in a protected world where we only pushed ourselves towards things we couldn’t fail at or if we did, we would land softly. My son goes after what he wants with little fear that he will fail, because the only failure to him, is to stop trying altogether. He’s been cut from teams and told he wasn’t good enough and his response is simply “wait until they see me next year and they won’t even have a choice but to put me on”. While many kids were upset that COVID hit, school shut down and their sports season got cancelled, he buckled down. He used the time to train harder and longer, started running outdoors to increase his stamina, spent hours juggling and shooting the ball and treated the extra time as a gift he was given to solely focus on his goals and surpass those that maybe had more talent but weren’t near as committed. Staring rejection in the face takes courage. How big would we all live if we had the courage to keep trying until we succeeded?
Health
I started my healthy journey back in 2015 focused mostly on my physical health. I knew I was physically fatigued and my body was inflamed but I didn’t realize how much of that was also exaggerated by anxiety, stress and frustration. In addition to getting regular exercise and fueling my body with foods that I responded well to, I learned that I feel so much more alive when I am processing my emotions and consistently managing my mind. This also allows me to fully experience life without leaning on food or alcohol to numb the emotion. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel overwhelmed or stressed at times, it just means that I’m aware of it, and know that accepting and processing it is by far more productive than indulging in it.
What are the most important lessons this part year has taught you?