Let’s face it, it’s been a dumpster fire of a year. 2020 gave us a global pandemic that, as of this writing, has taken the lives of over 1.5 million of our fellow human beings. And for the lucky rest of us, it put a hard stop to our normal, everyday existence by imprisoning us in our homes, isolating us from friends and loved ones, and crashing our economy. People have been left grieving, jobless, fearful, and barely hanging on.
And if that wasn’t enough, the year that kept on giving also brought us unbelievable levels of political chaos and social tension so severe that it hasn’t felt like an overreaction to wonder if our nation would even survive. But 2020 didn’t stop there! It also gave us raging fires, deadly hurricanes, and murder hornets. It took Kobe Bryant, Alex Trebek, Sean Connery, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from us. It even tried to take our toilet paper!
But even in our present struggles, we can still find meaning if we look hard enough. Finding joy in a time of darkness is, at its most basic, about shifting your perspective. Most people who know me have heard me preach that “what’s good” is always available if you look for it—even in situations that may seem quite bad—like the year 2020. As this year (finally) comes to an end, now is a good time to comb through the wreckage Hurricane Veinte-Veinte left behind, to find and take the buried treasures with us before we toss this year to the curb and move the hell on with our lives.
Here are a few of the lessons that 2020 really seems to want us to learn:
Appreciate the little things.
“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
It’s been well researched that the feeling of gratitude acts like a natural anti-depressant in the brain. Weirdly, 2020 gave us a lot of opportunities to feel grateful. I don’t know about you, but at the height of my lockdown, when everything felt so scary, every time I used my phone to order food or groceries, I felt grateful for a technology that I had taken for granted before. Every time my friends and I had a glass of wine together on a group FaceTime, I appreciated them more than ever. And, if you were unlucky enough to actually contract the virus (like me), then recovering reminded you how wonderful it could be to feel healthy and alive again.
Now, finally, 2021 is right around the corner, along with a vaccine and hope of travel, warm hugs, sweaty dance clubs, high fives, and big family get-togethers. Just think about how many amazing parts of everyday life we’re going to get to feel grateful for! Let’s take the lesson from this year and never take for granted how precious the little things in life are.
You are stronger than you think.
“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” – Christopher Reeve
Growth requires discomfort. When we are challenged and stretched beyond our limits, that’s when we find the strength we didn’t know we had. When life is hard and dark and scary but, nevertheless we persist, that’s when we discover what we’re truly capable of.
Millions of us are struggling with illness, grief, loneliness, professional uncertainty and financial hardship right now. But in that pain, we have the opportunity to learn to see in ourselves the kind of everyday hero that Superman was talking about. Life is full of difficult periods, and to get through them we just keep persevering; it doesn’t have to be pretty.
As we near the end of 2020 (#hallelujah!), take a little moment to appreciate the fact that you’re still going. No matter how much garbage this year has thrown at you, you keep putting one foot in front of the other. Never mind how much wine, Netflix, and Grubhub it’s taken to get through it, you are doing it! And if you can get through this, just think what other hard things you can do! When life (hopefully) gets easier in 2021, maybe you’ll maintain your newfound strength and apply it in the direction of pursuing a goal or dream that previously felt scary? The secret to success is to just not stop until you get where you want to be. Take the perseverance 2020 has taught you into the new year, and oh the places you’ll go!
Accept and surrender the things you cannot control.
“Let go or be dragged.” -Zen Proverb
This year has been characterized by tremendous uncertainty. It has been impossible to predict from one day to the next what the future might bring. Our health, the health of our families, our jobs, our communities, our government, pretty much everything feels up in the air.
When faced with any kind of uncertainty, there are two options:
1. Worry about the future, focusing on everything that might go wrong and just how bad things could get until you’ve made yourself sick with anxiety.
or. . .
2. Learn to live in the present, looking only at what is in your control and, from there, try to do the next right thing.
Life will always be full of unexpected challenges. However, worrying about the future is not a way to solve problems; it’s a way of letting them paralyze you with fear. The quicker you can accept that your current situation is what it is, the quicker you will be able to adapt to it and develop a new strategy to move forward based on what’s real, rather than wasting energy trying to defend against the phantom scenarios in your head.
Victor Frankel, famously, wrote that one of the miracles of being human is our capacity for finding meaning, even while suffering horrors as unfathomable as life in a Holocaust concentration camp. As he taught, we can’t control what happens in life, but we can always control what it means to us.
Feeling pain doesn’t need to mean we are defined by pain, or even that pain is always bad. Our pain comes from resisting what is, because it isn’t in alignment with our preference for how we believe life should be. But if we choose to look at life as happening for us, not to us, it trains us to look for the gift and find positive meaning in everything that happens. Once you accept that, at this moment, life has chosen to give you this situation, you can transform it by surrendering to it.
“Surrender” often gets a negative connotation. People hear the word and think it only means “giving up.” But I believe surrender is counterintuitively one of the most difficult and rewarding things you can learn. Maybe 2020 forced you to press pause on the ambitious goals and brilliant plans you had made for yourself. You can cry and moan over the loss, or you can sit back and marvel at the mysteries of life and laugh at the ridiculous thought that you might control such a force.
The surrender I’m talking about is not passive; it is actively showing up to life, as life is showing up for you. Learning to surrender and release our death grip on life puts us in alignment with the present. It allows us to open and receive the vast possibilities that surround us, attuning us to the magic of the Universe.
Challenge the status quo.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin
I believe that, in the long run, we’re going to look back on this time as being truly transformative. In just a few months, basic beliefs that have governed the structure of our society for decades suddenly seem like nothing but old habits that, thanks to technology, can now be tossed in the trash.
In 2020, it turns out that we don’t need to go to an office to work. It turns out that kids don’t have to live near their school to learn. It turns out that there’s no reason to fly back and forth all over the world just for meetings or conferences. And if all that’s the case, maybe we don’t actually have to move to the big city to get a good job. Maybe we don’t need to fight for every dollar just to afford a house in an expensive school district. Maybe we don’t have to burn up the environment for businesses to function.
2020 forced us to rethink much of what passed as status quo. It let us ignore the assumption that “This is the way things need to be done,” and instead ask ourselves, “How else could we do this?” The 2020 mindset is one that expedites innovation, adaptation, and evolution, and we’re going to be seeing the effects of it for generations.
The same is true for your own life. Try to embrace the newness of this world and see what possibilities might open up for you. Take inventory of your life and notice the things you don’t necessary like. Who says it has to be this way? Challenge your preconceived assumptions, unconscious patterns, silent rules and invisible limitations. Think bigger. . . Ask yourself questions like, “What if anything was possible? What do I really want and how can I make it happen?”
Have you always wanted to live in a little house in the country, but felt like you couldn’t because your job was in the city? We may just be entering a time when, with a dream and a good Wi-Fi connection, anything is possible if we just think bigger.
Happiness requires connection.
“All you need is love.” — The Beatles
With stay-at-home orders, social distancing, closed borders, plexiglass walls, BLM protests, and a heated election, life in 2020 appears at first blush to have been nothing but profound, wall-to-wall isolation, division, and conflict, but take another look. Behind those deep feelings of separation is an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate how much we need to feel connected to each other.
The truth is, we were all connected this year. Each of us had unique experiences, but we were all forced to navigate the same threat. We shared a global experience of hardship, with the whole planet at war with one common enemy. The feelings that arose from the experience, the feelings you and I endured, the pervasive loneliness and subsequent depression, taught us just how important intimacy, connection and community are for our health and happiness.
Many of us were moved to offer our love and support to those who needed it, even if all we could do was bang pots and pans so that they knew we were thinking about them. There was an unprecedented number of pet adoptions this year (roughly a 70% increase), giving homes and care to animals who might otherwise have remained caged or been killed. Our isolation also presented an opportunity to reconnect with ourselves on a deeper level. For some of us, that meant learning to be with ourselves and enjoy our own company for the very first time.
Hopefully, as the world reopens, we will bring with us an understanding of the importance of authentic connection and truly being present with the people in our lives. Even the superficial interactions we previously found unimportant—shaking hands when you meet someone, seeing the smile of a shop clerk—can hold new meaning for us if we remember just how hungry we were for them during the dark, lonely days of 2020. Let’s hold those hugs a little longer as soon as we are allowed to be within six feet of each other.
Slow down. (And reflect.)
“The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered ‘Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.’”
Before this year, most of us went through life like it was a set of Ikea instructions. Step one, high school; step two, college; step three, job, then better job, then better, better job. Maybe a spouse and some kids got shoved in there at some point and hopefully an occasional beach vacation! What was left was a life as wobbly and ready to collapse as a dresser built with an Allen wrench.
Most of us jumped straight into the rat race of hurry up and get ahead, and we never paused long enough to ask ourselves hard questions like, “Who am I?”; “What do I want?”; “Why am I here?” We put our heads down and committed to our paths, finding glory in our grind and significance in our stress. We never paused on the never-ending to-do list/hamster-wheel long enough to wonder whether any of it even mattered.
And then, the pandemic hit.
In the biz, we call this a “pattern interrupt.” An event so unexpected, so out of the ordinary happens that not only does it stop us in our tracks, it makes us wonder how we got in those particular tracks in the first place. It’s as if 2020 shook us all awake out of a very, very boring dream.
No longer able to hide behind the story of busyness, we were suddenly forced to slow down and reflect on our lives—something most of us had worked extremely hard to avoid. It usually isn’t until a birthday with a zero behind it sneaks up and bitch slaps us across the face, that we reflect on our own mortality and realize that we only have a finite amount of time left on this Earth—you know, classic mid-life crisis stuff.
Well, this pandemic has induced a premature mid-life crisis for a lot of people— and what a great thing that is! Sure, questioning things like our identity, core values, and purpose doesn’t feel so hot and can shake the foundations on which we have built our lives. Yes, it can feel confusing, overwhelming, and anxiety-inducing, but when you are confused, you look for answers. And when you are looking for something, that’s when you tend to find it!
The extra time provided by the pandemic has allowed people to reflect on what really matters and to realign their lives accordingly. Being locked in our houses has created boredom that some people have handled by scraping the dark corners of Netflix and constantly refreshing their social media channels. But others have taken the opportunity to learn a new hobby, get healthy, reconsider their careers, finally write that book, or spend quality time with their kids.
Often the greatest lessons and the most dramatic growth emerge from our hardest experiences. To become a butterfly, the caterpillar must fall apart completely, and decompose down to its very essence, devoid of any shape or consciousness; it literally dies. There is nothing left of it. And from this liquid essence, the butterfly begins to put itself back together, from scratch.
If you chose to let it, 2020 might have provided the quarantine cocoon that facilitated your own transformation, an opportunity to reemerge with a whole new self, a whole new life, hell—maybe even a whole new world!? A world where we have a greater appreciation for the little things in life and for each other. A world where we waste less energy worrying about things we can’t control and spend more energy on the things that matter most to us.
So, THANK YOU 2020, for turning our upside-down world, upside down, such that we might finally start living right side up.
Much Love,
P.S. Now maybe you’re saying, “Well shit, Meg, now that you put it like that. . .I feel even worse about myself, because I didn’t do a damn thing to ‘transform’ my life”. Have no fear, it’s not too late. I have created an online coaching program called “The Fulfillment Framework” to help expedite your expansion by guiding you through a process to help you understand who you uniquely are, and how to design a fulfilling life and career you love. You can check it out here.
P.P.S. If you are one of the #blessed people who haven’t had too rough of a year, maybe consider helping those less fortunate by donating to one of the following organizations:
GoFundMe has set up a central fundraising database to directly help individuals struggling with costs associated with COVID-19.