In the old days, when broadcast television was the only way to see the shows that you wanted, the commercials between those shows was often the only time to grab a drink, or run to the bathroom.
If the show was live, you would often hear the phrase ‘and we’re back’ signaling that time was again moving on, and that if you weren’t in your seat now, you were going to miss things.
So now it’s time for me to say ‘and we’re back’.
Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve written. Life has had a lot of moving parts over the past couple of months.
Between helping one of my sons get the time in to pass his driving test, coaching a client who lives on the other side of the world (time zone math is not my friend) and still trying to run a healthcare practice in the ever changing face of a pandemic, I’ve been neglecting not only this work, and all of you, but even my own emotional and physical health.
In short, I haven’t been making the time to look after me.
Which is something I think we are all guilty of at some point. In the last year, as the pandemic turned our world and our lives upside down, a lot of what hasn’t been an immediate need has fallen by the wayside.
Instead of living peaceful, meaningful and satisfying lives, many of us have been moving from one crisis to the next, struggling to put out fires, and trying to understand why we feel so drained, and so very, very tired.
And since I’ve been pondering this question for a while now, I’d like to share my answer with you.
I think it might be because we’ve been living a set of expectations and understandings that barely served us in the world before the pandemic, and which were in no way suited to helping us thrive and flourish in a world that seemingly went mad for a while.
Even before the virus arrived, many of us struggled to find a deep sense of meaning and joy in our lives.
Add to that a pandemic, and things just get kind of strange.
Because our sense of community has been changed. As someone who is an introverted extrovert (which means I am great when it comes time to be around people, but I really need my solitude and quiet time) I’ve not struggled as much as some with the enforced isolation, but I’ve noticed that as my sense of community has gotten smaller, so my sense of happiness and support and has decreased as well.
Apparently even people who don’t often need people still occasionally need people. Who knew
But we’ve also been measuring ourselves against a backdrop of metrics that didn’t account for the world around us shifting beneath our feet. We became too focused on what we couldn’t do, rather than gratefully realizing that there were still choices available to us, just not necessarily as many as we wanted.
When you forget that a limited choice is still a choice, you start forgetting just how good you still have it.
If I’ve learned anything in the past few months, it’s that the only real power I have in any situation is the emotions I allow myself to experience from what happens, and how I feel about my responses in the moment to the meanings I take from the circumstances. (Yes, I know that sentence was a lot, it was supposed to be)
If I forget that I still have power, then I fall into the feeling of being powerless, which tears at even the strongest souls.
So I’m choosing to get back into this work. I don’t know if it I will write very day, but hopefully it will be a lot more frequent than it has been, and hopefully I’ll bring you something to make you think, to pause to reflect, and to wonder.
Thanks for sticking around, I really appreciate you.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings