All of it

This post started from a conversation that I had with my partner at the beginning of 2021. After being consumed with COVID in a large part of 2020,  I was thinking how I was going to make sense of it in my personal journey and move on into a new year. I was under the naive  assumption that it was not coming with me into another year. This was very reminiscent of how I had started many other new years in the past.  I had been part of every new year beginning being sold to us and engaged with vision boards, setting goals and intentions, feeling like a new year meant transforming myself and my life.  It all felt like work for me and a bit too much like a process of not measuring up to a standard that wasn't mine. I had moved away from taking  on  seeing myself as not enough. Now I was looking more at transforming circumstances for my perfectly imperfect self and stepping away from all of the influence that seemed to be about selling me something that made me not trust who I already was.  So new years day arrived and I very casually  asked my partner what he was taking with him from 2020 and his response was, "All of it".  He explained that although it may sound cliche, the whole year   had so many learning curves and his take away  was really to stay present and open for all of it. 

 His perspective was  not  a popular one in  the culture I had already been disillusioned by that  sells the idea of a new year being a time of letting go,  and starting fresh,  as if somehow, WE are navigating the proverbial ship into a perfect utopia. This is not to say that you shouldn't let go of the things weighing you down whenever they may be, or that you can't bring new intentions into your life but this is a practice we do daily and we won't walk into a new year without heavy things or  with a blank slate. A new year gives us an opportunity to remember  that each day comes to us with new challenges and offers us opportunities to show up for ourselves and others.  We are invited to support one another knowing that  sometimes we will  bring the rock and other times , the feather. 

What if this year, we  decide to take not only ourselves as we are but all of what the year brought to us?  What if we learn from all of it ?  What if we stay  present with the humanity  we  have witnessed , the transformations in the world we  have seen, the reality of the  lack of control evident in our outer circumstances? What if we embrace the beauty of the real connections in our lives and the authenticity that comes from the not knowing and not having all the answers , admitting it and knowing that it is perfectly ok? What if we think of the whole experience of a new year as being given another opportunity to remember who we already are, what we already have in abundance in our lives, to remember  the experiences that have shaped us this year, the people who have shown up for us and to remember how proud we are of ourselves that we keep showing up in all the ways for our self, others and the world. Here's to taking all of us and "all of it" into another year of remembering.