Alexa, skip to 2021… That’s a joke. Why would I say that now? Saying it back in June or July would have meant something but who cares now. It’s been a tough year, not gonna gloss over that. It seems the trendy thing to say now is always how #grateful and #blessed we all are. That’s great because wallowing can be a dangerous place, but we shouldn’t bypass the difficult and hard-to-even-identify emotions we’ve all wrangled with at some point these last nine months.

I am not a Susie Sunshine kind of person who can always find the positive. BUT I do firmly believe that what we focus on gets bigger (thanks Oprah for that life lesson). When I focus on the work meeting that went totally awry and never found common ground for how to move forward on the project, everything about my day looks frustrating. Instead, when I say, “Yeah, that didn’t go as planned. I’m going to reach out to each person individually and get their input” somehow I feel more empowered to get things on track.

Similarly, there were a lot of things that went down in 2020 that could make it seem like we are on a less than sunny trajectory. OR I can choose to see how 2020 brought into focus the things I want to spend my energy on. I love a podcast called The One You Feed based off this parable, and one of the recent guests who was so intense I was cracking up throughout, Wim Hof, said a lot of times the bad wolf shows us the good wolf in our lives. So like I was saying before, 2020 showed us the bad wolf. That’s good! Otherwise we would have continued thinking we were so great and had all our sh*t together.

2020 Tails                                                                 

• Racial unrest
• COVID-19 pandemic
• Mom diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer
• Staying at home for 9 months, no vacation or fun travel
• Lots of political controversy

2021 Heads

• Efforts to achieve racial justice and greater diversity represented in at all levels of society
• A stronger focus on working toward health equity
• Prioritizing family time and feeling the love of all my friends who supported me
• Extra time in the garden and with my chickens; allowed the pace of my life to slow down and make sure the way I spend my time reflects what I value as important
• New administration and congress that will *hopefully* be forced to compromise

Farewell 2020. No one knew what you had in store for us and thank God for that!

Cheers to 2021!!!