really the biggest lesson of the year for me has been an unparallelled mindfulness, leading to the clarity that there needs to be a shift, both in my life and the world at large, away from the broken system of scrambling for scraps and towards community, empathy, and purpose. easier said than done, especially for the greater world stuff, but we gotta start somewhere.
i also learned to listen to my body when it tells me to slow the eff down, and to sleep, and to eat better!! iām one of those rare unicorns that came out of the first lockdown having found the perfect routine and the ideal amount of sleep and a better diet, donāt @ me, itās great. i learned to shop less, and to articulate my needs without feeling guilty about it (still working on that one, actually), and to love with total abandon.
some things, like my reading and my writing, took a hit, as did my faith in peopleāweāre still arguing about masks and social distancing and whether or not we should all do christmas together!! my patience is running thin!!ābut overall, this was a year for reflection on an unprecedented scale, and while i loathe the conditions it happened in, i donāt loathe what iāve taken away from it. maybe some of it wonāt be actionable till the world resumes to spin again, but the building blocks of necessary change are there, and that matters a lot right now.
so here we go, 31! i feel good about it, even if itās an odd number.