I don’t have to tell you about this year in a global sense, so I’ll get personal.
This year, I broke a lot of promises to myself, professionally, and in my personal life. The resources – literal or internal – just weren’t there anymore.
This year, every silver lining seemed to usher in another fleet of menacing thunderheads.
I stopped reading the news for months and focused on my own tiny microcosm. It wasn’t great. Even just my own smallest sphere, I’m coming off of four years of health crisis: three (separately) broken bones, an year-plus-long bout with chronic exercise-induced hives, enduring medication side-effects that have hamstrung many of my fitness goals. All of these, key players in my worst nightmares as a full-time personal trainer. All of these, not even half the list of what I dealt with this year professionally. All of these, plus the background hum we all endure now – will this commonplace thing work the way it used to? What will I have to adapt to next?
Where do we go from here?
Here’s what I know: it’s time to set your own rock bottom.
You can’t control everything. But you never could before, either.
You don’t have to succumb to the gray groundhog day world. Neither do you have to be toxically positive.
We can take things exactly as they are – shortages and delays, limits, uncertainty, frustration – and choose to keep ourselves away from the edge of the cliff. We can love ourselves enough to say: enough is enough, I choose gratitude, growth, and peace again.
Eating that bonus pint of ice cream won’t make the world better when you wake up the next day, but it might take you farther from feeling good in your own skin.
Downing the extra glass-ish of wine to take the edge off won’t change what anyone is doing around you, but it might make it harder for you to handle it well tomorrow.
Hibernating on the couch is necessary sometimes, but if it’s your dominant form of exercise, you already know that you deserve to feel better.
You might not be able to reach your goals perfectly – I hit just 3/4 of mine this year, with many of the most important ones in that missing 25% – but the steps you can take toward them still count.
The steps you take might look different than you thought they would, but that was true in 2019, too.
I think it’s time to go for it again. Let’s set small goals and make the tiny changes that count, let’s just show up and see what happens, let’s stay adaptable and resilient and keep trying again as long as tomorrow keeps coming. One tiny step at a time. That’s what we’ve always had to do, anyway.
