Hindsight is 2020
On New Year’s Eve, 2019, I wrote a recap of my year and predicted that 2020 was going to be one of the most monumental years of our lives. Little did I know that I would be adding “Psychic” to my bag of tricks, for low and behold it did indeed live up to my grand expectations!
While every year comes with its own trials and tribulations, this year put us all to the test. While we all weathered the same storm, many of us were in different boats and some of us were even drowning. I want to pay homage to all the lives lost this year and to send my love and deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones. A list of lessons will certainly not make up for your loss and I want to call that out since it feels appropriate.
This entire experience has almost felt like a strange sci-fi movie, where Mother Nature was putting us all in a time out to have us ponder how we have been living our lives. I don’t know about you, but during this year of solitude, I have uncovered some hard and beautiful truths. I would love to know if you can relate and would also encourage you to share your own in the comments, along with your hopes for a brighter year ahead.
Lesson #1 Gratitude
Before 2020 there were SO MANY things that I took for granted! Do you know that famous expression, health is wealth? I did not fully appreciate my health and what it allows me to do until this year. When your health is threatened, so much of your freedoms are gone right along with it.
Speaking of freedoms, I took those so much for granted as well. Going to restaurants, bars, and even hanging out at friends’ houses seems like such a luxury now. Even the simple act of a hug from a loved one will be felt with so much more presence than ever before.
I want to give a major shoutout to technology and how grateful I am to have lived in a time where vaccines can be created in under one year and that I could stay connected to loved ones through Zoom. I could not imagine doing this in 1918 or being Anne Frank trapped in an attic with only her books and no connections to the outside world. It seriously puts so much into perspective!
I would also be remiss if I did not mention the amazing healthcare and frontline workers who showed incredible bravery during this unprecedented time.
People that rarely ever receive any recognition in our society, are the ones that were our soldiers against an invisible enemy. We need to find an appropriate way to repay them and help them build brighter futures.
Lesson #2 State of Mind
With so much uncertainty, it takes a conscious effort to maintain a positive outlook on life. It also takes a lot of resilience when you are doing it all on your own.
I was proud of my accomplishment of turning lemons into lemonade and asking for support when needed. This has been a truly humbling experience and I am closer with myself and my loved ones because of it.
Lesson #3 Love for All Beings
I had not fully realized that animals were sentient beings until this experience. Quarantining with my cat, Dolce La Rue, for a year made me much more aware of his habits, emotions, and needs as my roommate. Turns out even house pets need their space and wonder why you never leave the house anymore! But on a more serious note, we had a difficult time as a human race being confined to our homes. How do you think animals feel being locked up in cages for our amusement?
This experience also made me much more conscious of where our food comes from and how inhumane we treat animals for our own benefit. Needlessly killing animals and caging them is what got us in this mess in the first place. We can blame Wuhan all we want, but our food production in the states is just as barbaric.
The sad truth is that pandemics will become more rampant as we continue to kill mother nature. We have already killed 70% of our planet’s wildlife. How will we be able to look ourselves in the eyes if we have decimated our home and all of the magical and innocent creatures that inhabit it? My heart breaks just thinking about this.
Lesson 4 Pulling Back The Veil
Racism, hate crimes, and the worst of humanity was seeping out of our pours and crumbling the very foundation of our society. However, it had always been there and our privilege had just made us blind to see it.
I learned how scared people are of losing power, money, and status in the world. It was amazing to see how greedy humans had become, even after seeing how interconnected we all are.
It became abundantly clear that this was not a political problem, but a spiritual reckoning, and that we were in deep need of an awakening.
While President Trump is a small blip in our world’s history, I am very grateful for him, for he played his role quite perfectly. He will go down in the history books as one of the most memorable Presidents because he was the catalyst to uncover all of our generational and systemic trauma. Now that he is out of the office and we have shown that love truly does prevail, the real work is upon us.
Politically speaking, we do not have a red and blue state problem. We have cities versus suburbs and rural America problem. It is time for us to sit down and have some difficult conversations, where we are willing to LISTEN and to practice EMPATHY. The honest to God truth is that we have vastly different realities, but at the end of the day we are both looking for love, compassion, and safety.
We can no longer sweep our problems under the rug like the generations before us. It is time to confront our differences and also be brave enough to change with the times. Change is the only constant in life and it is time to make progress, not regress into a world that was not working for the majority of people on our planet.
Lesson #5 Midlife Unraveling
I turned 40 this year and while I was supposed to celebrate it on a 20-acre vineyard with friends flying in from all across the country, instead I sat in my living room alone with different zoom parties.
In the end, it turned out to be the greatest gift I could have ever asked for since I requested that all the people in my life answer these three questions. 1) What is your favorite memory with me? 2) What do you think my magic is? 3) What is your wish for me in the next 40 years?
To my pleasant surprise, this ask went beyond inflating my ego and making me feel good on my special day. It actually uncovered beautiful trends in the ways people saw me and made me realize my gifts that I should be capitalizing on.
Between me being jobless with no prospects in sight, time to daydream and create, and marching orders from my loved ones, I was able to create two new companies that activated my life’s purpose. Movement Maker and Row and Release were born and brought into the world!
As I blew out my candles for my 40th birthday, my wish was to not give a fuck any longer….meaning…jump past my fear and be brave enough to create the life that I wanted. Both companies that I have created take a ton of courage to showcase the most vulnerable aspects of myself. This year has taught me that the right people will love me for doing just that and that the wrong people will fade away. However, ultimately it is up to me how I show up for myself, which is the most important.
Lesson #6 Money As a Spiritual Practice
When shit hit the fan, we learned that over 60% of Americans could not live for more than two weeks because they did not have any savings. Small businesses folded quickly and we realized how little control many of us had and how fragile we all are. Myself included.
This has been a year of reexamining my relationship with money and purposely setting up different expectations around how it flows in and out of my life. We are not necessarily taught that money is an act of self-love and self-care. How much money you make and how much you have saved in the bank is a direct result of your self worth, what stories you hold around money, and the privileges (and lack thereof) that you have had in your life.
I have taken much more responsibility for my finances this year, but have also become much more aware of how capitalism breeds a very corrupt and immoral society. My hope is that we can redistribute wealth, so not so many people need to endlessly suffer. My hope is also to teach children financial freedom and the mindset of abundance from an earlier age. It is mind-blowing to me that we spend so much time teaching our children the Pythagoras Theorem, but they so oftentimes do not understand the importance of saving for the future and their credit. This needs to change now.
While there are a million more lessons I could conjure up, these have been the most impactful on me. My wish for 2021 is that we learn and grow from our experiences and do not waste this precious gift of hindsight.
I often say that pain is our power but we must walk through it first. We have walked through much heartbreak and we have the opportunity to recreate a world that is much more beautiful, accepting, and mindful of others and our planet. I wish you all a very happy New Year that is filled with love. Please be safe and hold your loved ones a little tighter this year.
