Just a few more weeks to go until another pandemic year fades away. My feelings are mixed as we inch toward 2022. My only certainty is there will be change ahead.
We have so much to learn from our fortitude and struggles. Whether we choose to is our personal choice. If we allow ourselves to be open and reflect, imagine the possibilities as they ripple and echo beyond our personal bubbles.
Gift wrap up 2021. Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay
Will we get one step closer to a complete return to pre-pandemic norms? Will we face more obstacles to our personal, societal, and economic stability? Or will we finally figure out how to get into a groove that propels us to a place that is even better than before? Will we grow and transition, together with the strength of united survival or grow apart based upon our differences in values, beliefs, opinions, styles?
Change is exciting and daunting and often in between. The filters for viewing change are people and circumstance dependent. Change could mean finally leaving your home for a much anticipated vacation rescheduled and rescheduled as covid surges raised travel warnings again and again. Change could mean rethinking the types of items we pack. Remember to include extra face masks, personal hygiene goods, necessary documentation. Change has affected protocols, service quality, wait times due to staff reductions and additional document verifications, and other processes that didn’t exist prior to 2020 or have morphed into more complex procedures.
Change could mean finally seeing friends and relatives after absences way too long. Change could also mean wondering if every cough, each sneeze warrants a shuffle a few more steps away to a safer personal space bubble.
Change could mean professional transitions. An opportunity to create a new mission for your business or step into a new job or position within the same company. One that not only pays the bills, it fuels your passion while sharing your inherent and learned gifts.
Change could mean stepping into a new year with a new outlook, a new reason for hope, renewed vitality, and paths to prosperity. An avenue to forge new relationships, nuture age-old friendships and loves, and mend battered and broken ones.
Change could mean finally getting to all those past-due household projects. Those mellowing piles, the scattered files, jumbled cupboards, overflowing garages, inaccessible attics, and scary basements. Change could mean finally walking into any room in your house and feeling a sense of “ah”.
Since you began reading this blog, you’re a few minutes closer to wrapping up 2021, wrapping up another chapter in a 2 year surreal saga that for me, feels like it may never end, that feels like it’s gone on way too long, that feels like it’s time for a change. My gift to you is hopefully a new or reoriented look at change. To accept that change isn’t permanent. Change is actually a temporary occurence.
The outcomes resulting from that change will impact us in small or big ways or not at all. We may not notice that change is happening. That our partner’s hair is slowly graying, that our kids bodies are lengthening or widening, and faces are chiseling, that relationships are getting more comfortable or slipping away. Change is happening all the time. You will have the strength to deal with it on some days and likely not so much on others. You will give a hand to those who aren’t dealing so well, and you will be propped up by loved ones and sometimes complete strangers when you’re sagging so low.
Get ready to make peace or kick the heck out of 2021. Gift wrap it up and let it go swiftly and permanently. When you open the doors to 2022 be certain it has space to enter your home, your life, your world so that you can make the most of your newest opportunity. See you in 2022.
