2. 2021 Owes You Nothing

The final days of 2020 are upon us and there seem to be two polarized camps of people out there sharing boisterously about the close of 2020 and the coming of 2021. 

The first are those who will tell you any chance they get that 2020 was an utter disaster, that they can not wait for it to be over, and seem to allude to a sincere hope that they will wake up on January 1st as if from a bad dream to a 2019 level normalcy. 

Then there's the spiritual types, coaches, and the enlightened who claim 2020 was the best year of their lives yet behind their sparkling eyes lies a hint of veiled chaos and a sense that the journey to the depths of their souls has been a rewarding yet unexpectedly bumpy one. Neither is right or wrong but one thing is for sure, both have created a concept of 2020 that they each, for better or worse, have had to live through and will likely continue living into for the foreseeable future.  

Most are doing a sort of awkward dance somewhere in between. One thing that seems true across the board is that from day to day, or sometimes, moment to moment we have become familiar with experiencing much louder and more proximate feelings, reactions, and emotions than we used to. From frustration to gratitude to loneliness to resourcefulness to powerlessness to compassion to determination to hopelessness to hopefulness... It has been a big year for feelings and if you aren’t someone who is comfortable with or accustomed to that, it very well may have taken you by surprise. 2020 has been a hard year to be a human, a busy year to be a spiritual being, and a trippy and surreal year for all of us that are a hybrid of the two. Some of the challenges we turned into opportunities and others we let consume us for a while until we no longer liked how it felt, got curious, picked ourselves up, and moved forward, more often than not turning those into opportunities as well.  

What we discovered in this journey was that the epidemic in our world is not one of increased challenging external factors, after all, those have been present for humans since the beginning of time and for most of recorded history have been intensely more ominous than anything 2020 pulled out. It is rather a lack of practice and skill at cultivating the needed curiosity and awareness to accurately frame, calibrate, and experiences our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs that we actually suffered from this past year. Most of us want to be happy and we want to feel good, but when we honestly examine what that would take, it would seem we are often simply just not willing to create it for ourselves. Ultimately, when we give our power away to external forces, we have to be content with what they create for us. 

I have heard the past year be compared to a roller coaster a lot which is funny because the purpose of roller coasters is entertainment but they don’t seem to be referring to a good time when they make the reference... Consider for a minute why roller coasters are fun. If you hate roller coasters then use your willing suspension of disbelief for a second and think about why other people find them fun. They zip up, and then they plummet down, and so on and so forth. One could conclude from watching one in operation for any period of time that the lows are necessary to reach the highs and without them, you’d just have a rather benign miniature train ride through an over crowded theme park. What makes a roller coaster fun rather than terrifying is that you know it will eventually end and you’ve seen other people ride it, enjoy it, and come out the other end alive and well. This is also true in life. The contrast of the highs and the lows is what infuses the experience with depth and meaning but without the faith that the ride will one day end and that we will survive to tell the tale, not many would willingly get on in the first place. 

I was reading the Brene Brown book 'Dare to Lead' earlier this year and the following excerpt struck me in a profoundly personal way. 

From Stockdale, a military leader when asked to reflect on his experience as a prisoner in captivity...

He was asked which people didn't make it out and his reply was this: "Oh, that's easy. The Optimists. They would believe they would be out by Christmas, and Christmas would come and go. Then they would believe they'd be out by Easter and that date would come and go. And the years would tick by like that... Eventually, they died of a broken heart."

Stockdale continues, "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your reality, whatever they might be."

We are all physically and psychologically experiencing a type of collective captivity right now and these sentiments could not be more relevant for me in crafting my personal approach to what lies ahead. I see and sense so many hearts breaking or on the verge of breaking all around me and I believe this approach to hold the antidote.

I've struggled with balancing the strong emotional and rational currents within me. Now more than ever I recognize the urgency of uniting these two sides of myself: being a person of deep faith in the realm of positivity and a staunch believer that we must look reality directly in the eyes with no illusions as to its perils and possibilities.

Think about the last time you went on vacation and something very unexpected, even disastrous happened. Unless you are entirely humourless and have no capacity for self-reflection, chances are this terrible experience became the jewel in the crown of your vacation story because you made it through the other side and lived to tell the tale. What would be possible if we were to bring that same sense of adventure and faith in the unfolding of our own personal narratives into daily life? How might we experience it entirely differently?

Over the course of the last year, I have spent a great deal of time getting curious about my feelings and reflecting on the insights that process revealed. I have compiled powerful perspective reframes that have helped me get the most out of the lessons, challenges, gifts, and opportunities this past year has brought and that, if I was a betting man, would wager 2021 will likely be calling upon you to access as well. If you don’t love how you showed up for 2020 or at the very least can see some room for further growth and expansion then this arsenal will surely support your cause.

Final exercise from Chris Frolic - www.chrisfrolic.com