2020: What the....

We've all said it. 2020 should be cancelled. We'd like to return 2020 for a full refund, or fastforward to January 2021, or simply 2020 is garbage. But I read a post by Leslie Dwight that stopped me in my tracks.  

Instead of all of the negativity surrounding what's gone wrong so far, she begged the question "what if 2020 is the year we've been waiting for"? She asks what if we've been needing a year like this, that's so uncomfortable, so scary, so raw that it finally forces us to grow. We all know how we were feeling before. On the hamster wheel doing the same thing day-in and day-out running at full speed for something that we'd likely lost sight of. We weren't spending enough time together with our families, mental health and self-care were "trends" because we all needed it. We were overworked, under-slept, and disconnected. Not to mention the fact we had many societal issues that were continuing to go unchanged, and we took many of our creature comforts and the flexibility to do anything we wanted, for granted. 

This is the year for a major paradigm shift. This is the greatest opportunity we have ever had to get real with ourselves. To take a minute to pause and evaluate what we really want for ourselves and for the world we live in. This is the year we get to work differently, introduce flexibility where perhaps it didn't exist before, see our colleagues as their whole-selves at work instead of just the "work" version, do things in a new way and throw-away antiquated practices that don't serve us anymore. This is the year we get to evaluate if we're on a path that's aligned with our true goals and desires because it's a year that's shown us what really matters. Connection, fulfilment, and well-being. 

So as we start to re-emerge and build a revised version of our worlds for the second half of 2020, let's not forget the lessons we learned in the first half.

Let's change our perspective on 2020 and be excited about the power it's yielded for a chance to start fresh.