“…changing things in my life requires me to own the new normal. it'll take time to fit comfortably.”- Dinah Pearson
Every living thing on Mother Earth was born into a life of struggle. All of us go through different kinds and levels of our own ‘abnormal’. Societal ideologies of “Normal” and “Abnormal” have changed. After all, is it not Society that labels us all? We have all been cast with the shadows of all the “Abnormal” that living down her, conscious and alive, on this spinning globe, during these years of living with The Pandemic” and all the chaos and uncertainties that wrought in us and now “Climate Change” and another reason to be divisive. We have become experts at one thing; Surviving”. How do we get on to “overcoming” and “Thriving”?
We are cavemen, First People’s; however we came to first be, however it ended up that we crawled, slithered, flew, fell, into this Nature-Driven reality. We are back to knowing ‘things’ for the first time and not just a personal ‘thing’, a global ‘thing’. It includes the frustration, the sadness, the seriousness, the loss, the wary, the anxiety-driven life and we have suddenly become our own personal experts at surviving. Isn’t it time to retrieve authentic happiness (not denial, not transferred happiness through the many addictions we can use to deny reality)? We will never find that happiness through longing for the past nor worry about the future. We find it by being Present, in every physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual ways we can. Somehow we must turn off the anxiety and start living again, start finding happiness and peace where we are, right now.
Yes, yes, we will be living this sanitized (literally) version of normal right now. Turning off our Ego has been happening. For many, physical balance has been more in focus and we must take care of physical things we have left for later. Have we not, now, become aware of how tenuous “later” has become? Intellectually, we have been led by the nose of social media as to what is fact and what is fiction. (Please be aware, I am not saying media is fake news. I am referring to ‘Social Media’ that is rampant with conspiracy theories that many fob off as fact rather than find and research scientific facts.) We have come to know the emotional pain of ‘unknowing’. We have all been in the act of surviving and it has not always been pretty. We are anxious. We are unsure. We are angry. We have bucked at controls that have needed to be in place because we are such contrary, contradictive, beings. Rule followers have been rule-followers. Rule-breakers have been rule-breakers. Contrarians have shown their contrary side whether logical and sensible or not. We have been spiritually lost or lost ourselves in spirituality thinking that would save us…and sometimes that has had not happened and loss has been profound.
It feels like change happened fast and we were either wary enough to fear or abruptly thrown into the mixing of pandemic. We may feel like this is truly not a heavenly place at all and we are experience Hades as the world goes through the throes of weather and all of Mother Nature’s heightened changes. Society feeds us old labels for things that are becoming normal. It is NORMAL to feel pain, to experiences all the emotional chaos’ of sadness, anxiety, turmoil. It is normal to see the events in the world as something we have not experienced at these levels. Great personal and global compassion is required. This is a world of hurt right now and we are in it full throe. We are not alone in any of this.
Change leads to stress. The more ‘enforced’ change, the greater the uncertainty and anxiousness. Change is transitory and there is always an end to change. Right now, everything feels uncertain and we have only one thing to control: Ourselves. Who do we want to be through all this? What can we control in ourselves? Who do we want to be at the end of this?
We have learned, hopefully, to surrender to an unknown and not be armchair experts. We have been given an opportunity to learn patience, flexibility, compassion and respect. We have been conscious of what we truly need and what others need. We have been given the chance to understand others at a much deeper level and to have empathy/sympathy and tolerance for things we would never have believed.
We have learned to adapt to new routines (masks) and a personal responsibility in all of this. We have been offered a chance to take care of body, mind, heart and soul. We should have learned how to control ourselves in areas we gave no thought to before all this. Hopefully, we have learned to set new boundaries. Hopefully, we have learned a whole lot of self-compassion and being kind to self so we could be kind to others. It has been challenging, and, sometimes, a lonely walk through this valley of the unknown.
Hopefully, we have learned more about perspectives and about staying Present. We should have learned about our key triggers of fear. We have learned how to find joy in new things and in new ways.
Yes, yes, we have survived so far. We are learning to overcome. We will learn to thrive. Yes, we will learn to thrive in this new ‘Normal’.
©Carol Desjarlais 8.22.21
No comments:
Post a Comment