Ending 2020 on a positive note…

Hope in 2020

This article is not about vaccines getting shipped, it is not about who won the election, it is not about external factors. It is about internal factors that made this year very powerful. This is based on my experience and conversations with various friends. This year was about:

1. Caring for the body: This year I bought a bike, I went for a walk most days, I went for a hike when I could, I did some kind of yoga or exercise at home whenever I could. I wanted to make all of these my habit so I take care of my body. I am in my 30s and wanted to make sure that my body becomes more and more resilient to pandemic or any kind of future diseases to protect myself and my family.
2. Caring for what goes into the body: You are what you eat so this year was also about analyzing what this body needs and what I am giving it. I started with removing soy from my diet (needed as part of autoimmune disorder recovery), eating various color fruits every day in the form of smoothies (ate a lot of watermelon, pomegranate), eating a bowl of berries every day, eating more variety to the food. Healthy eating means healthy body which translates to feeling good about yourself and actually feeling fresh. This was important as I stayed home for majority of the year and did not want to make preparing food the biggest hurdle of going through the day but also not underestimate the importance of healthy eating to again protect myself and family from diseases.
3. Caring for the mind: It became so important sometimes to vent it out through conversations with friends and family over phone, through meditation, through even talking to the therapist, through writing down your feelings, and many other ways in which my friends and myself found peace during these times. The important thing here is that a lot of us now know how to take care of our minds and how to find solitude when right outside you there is a chaos.
4. Caring for the family: If you live indoors for so long, there will be times you will get frustrated or annoyed with people you live with. This was also the time when you only had them to take care of and been taken care by. They grounded us to who we are and how much we are loved and needed. I was reading this article in HBR and it made me realize how important it is to “build a culture at home in which” family members “instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, children obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.”
5. Caring for the world: We wore masks to protect others, we expected others to wear masks so that they protect us. We didn’t do irrational things to not jeopardize the health of an old neighbor or even an old person who didn’t know at all or even a healthy person who we did or did not know. We watched shows like “A Life on our Planet” on Netflix to see what we can do to contribute life to our future generations. We might not have started doing all of those things but it always starts with knowing what we can do to improve.

Though this year was not about traveling, shopping, looking good, making new friends and meeting new people, it was about taking care of us and our immediate surroundings. Though all of us can’t wait to go back out there and things to go back to normal, we know that if we have also found some good long lasting habits through last 10 months of practice.

Love and Peace

Elissa