A Year in Review
2020. What a year.
Looking back at the end of 2019, I thought to myself: “This was an incredibly hard year for me”. It was a year of tremendous personal and professional growth. A year of firsts, copious amount of self-loathing and salvation in the end.
Professionally, this was the first year I started to actually ‘travel’ for work, lead a team and acquire my own client. All three of these happened within a span of two months. It was pretty insane. My life revolved around my job predominantly. I was learning how to handle stress, pick my battles and deal with difficult people. Slowly, it took a toll on my mental well-being as I was wholly consumed with learning different aspects of the job while simultaneously bringing people up to speed and overall doing stellar work. It was not a healthy environment for me and soon enough, I found myself constantly on edge and ready to punch a blow at the next incriminating word. I was defensive and felt very cutthroat, to which I thought was pretty standard and what it usually take to be successful.
Towards the end of the year, in the midst of intense self-loathing and putting on pounds, I began to think what really matters to me. Why was I always stressed out? Was there something underlying this stress? What was it that I fear the most? So what if I fail, and fail at it greatly? Is it the end of the world? I then realized that none of these thoughts would truly materialize unless I was too focus on making them happen. As one of my professors in college once said, “pink flamingos”. They can be anywhere if you look for them constantly. My point is, this led me down to the path of mindfulness, or if I can bravely and with much seriousness say, meditation. Oh, how i treasure this and consider to be a marvelous gift on my path to self-discovery.
So by the end of 2019, I felt a slow but gradual shift in my mind and how I process words being said, situations that arise, and positive or negative thoughts that emerge. Truth is, nothing really matters. It’s all in our mind. Probably easier said than done, but I suppose this takes a lot of practice, tears and patience and when you finally get there, it is but a mere split second of pure joy and nothingness. But I am learning to take pleasure even in this simplest moments of breakthrough. I incorporated meditation to my life every day and started to plan other fun things that I may be missing out because of my old mindset teeming with fear.
I would say that 2019 was a difficult but a great year in terms of the opportunity for self-evaluation that it allowed me, but more importantly, for the renewed hope that the following year will be as good as I can make it out to be. It’s all under my control, or as I would like to believe.
Yet. 2020 is already proving to be a whirlwind of anxiety due to this global pandemic. I have been lucky to be able to work remotely, but for many others, this is a luxury they cannot afford. I constantly worry about my loved ones- Cody, mom, dad, siblings, friends and other people I know. I’d like to think that this is an opportunity for me to exercise my newfound skill of mindfulness. So far, it has been working. My experience has been that whenever I think of a gut-wrenching event, I try to separate myself from that thought, and sometimes that seems to work magically the first time. For the most part, it comes in waves and I am left exhausted trying to pry mind apart to rid myself of these thoughts. I’m still judging, not accepting. The idea of acceptance seem to have permeated the meditation community in a huge way, if they’re not already defined by it. but what is it, really, to accept?
Somewhere out there there’s a line that goes along the tune of, “Grant me the courage to change what I can, and the resilience to accept what I can’t”.
I think this might be the reverberating theme of this year for me.
There's a Light That Never Goes Out 