March 12th, 2020

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.”

Aristotle

At the start of 2020 I bought myself this nifty little desk calendar and I just found it again as I was unpacking after my recent move. Every day you get a tip or trick about how to be the best version of yourself.  All was going great…. until it wasn’t. The next day was the day I didn’t go into work and I kept my daughter Polly back from school. We were due to put our house on the market the following week and although our realtor said this wasn’t going to be a big deal, my hypervigilant-self felt otherwise. We were in a pandemic. No more pages were ripped off the calendar.

I also stopped my meditation in the morning, another New Year’s resolution.  I became really quite good at getting on my Peloton but my weightlifting workout (that I’d always done in the gym) had become non-existent.

It wasn’t all bad: we did sell our house which was a big decision that had been hanging over our heads for a while. Coronavirus has given us clarity around what we want to say yes to when all of this is over, and what we are saying no to right now.

We’ve had to sit with uncertainty, despair, inertia, apathy, anxiety and, for many, isolation. “We are all in this together” doesn’t quite cut it if you live on your own. Stress does not sit well with creativity.  It takes away from who we are showing up as.

We are also dealing with a lack of meaningful connection; we now only see our colleagues on Zoom. Apparently you need eight cuddles a day to get the right amount of oxytocin to feel good and four for survival.  That means that some people are over 900 hugs behind already. Add the upcoming election to this mix and it becomes easy to see this as nothing short of a disaster!

I didn’t ever make a conscious decision to give up on routines and rituals that serve me, why would I?  However it’s now time to get back to those routines, rituals and ways of being that we know are good for us. We can’t change where the world is right now but we do still have power in our worlds. We can be kind to ourselves and do things that we know will grow us. Creating a new space for ourselves which has different standards. We have been watchers of events unfolding for much of 2020. Now let’s start thinking who we will be and what we want to choose from the options available in 2021. 

"Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most."

Buddha