7 Life Lessons from 2020
I almost didn’t write a reflection on this past year (the sixth in this series). It seemed the only thing that everyone wanted was to completely forget this past year, with its incredible amounts of grief and loss on multiple fronts: a global pandemic, surfacing of underlying racial inequities, and political theatre that in the best of times seesawed like a boat tossed about in a category 5 hurricane.
But the longer I sat with the decision, the more I realized that if there were any year that necessitated a reflection, it was 2020, because life lessons from the roughest of years are often the most transformational.
So I decided to go through the exercise of winnowing through and boiling down the intense experiences of this past year. Like many others, I lived through anxiety, grief, stress, uncertainty, and aimlessness, as if the entire world had become unmoored from its anchor and had begun to drift out to sea.
#1 Exercise self-care through times of extreme stress
In some ways, I was thankful I had been through an emotionally crazy time back in 2015. I had already learned how to survive experiences that take your entire world and turn it upside down; you go back to the basics, focusing on physical and emotional health. Breathing. Working out. Sleep. Nutrition. Being gentle with yourself. Recognizing your own physical signs of overwork, stress, and anxiety, and finding healthy self-soothing behaviors. (I frequently cuddled cats during this time.)
In March and April, when the entire world was living through intense uncertainty, I intentionally fell back into these habits, giving myself the grace to just… exist. I didn’t have to produce anything, I didn’t have to be anything. I was okay with not being okay. And that pattern of life sustained me through the weeks of the corporate anxiety of the entire spring, through the incredible emotional storm of Facebook and Twitter as everyone I knew (some louder than others) grappled with the reality of a global pandemic and lamented the loss of everyday life.
#2 Prioritize ruthlessly for your long term outcomes
I had a conversation with a close friend a month or two ago, and he shared an inner conflict he was feeling about an activity that was allowed by his county. In the middle of talking through it together, I said, “I’m optimizing for full lung capacity at the end of the pandemic.”
Most of this year for me has been a series of conversations about risk management based on the peer-reviewed, scientific information available from the most reputable sources. But the conversations my closed social bubble has been having is around: what is risky? What are we optimizing for? How do we set and enforce the right boundaries? How do we manage social expectations of others who might not share our risk profile?
This focus on the end goal helps me shift away from an attitude of FOMO (fear of missing out), and turns the conversation more toward the intentional sacrifice of short-term conveniences in order to achieve a longer-term outcome. These conversations have been incredibly candid, and have built a surprising amount of trust and intimacy as a side effect.
Looking forward to a post-pandemic world, I want to be able to ruthlessly prioritize for the things that matter to me, and be okay with missing out on things that I’m intentionally sacrificing for that longer term goal. I don’t need to have it all. I can live without if I gain the greater thing I’m optimizing for.
#3 Proactively seek connection with restful people
If I were brutally honest, I could categorize the people in my life in three buckets: restorative, draining, and neutral. The people who are restorative always make me feel more encouraged, more loved, and more myself. The draining people take from me — emotional and physical energy. This doesn’t mean that they’re bad or people I don’t like; sometimes, these are people who are just high energy themselves and force me to shift into higher gear in order to keep up with them.
When everyone is stressed, it also shifts the equation a little bit. When I’m frayed at the edges already, the last thing I need to do is to have more emotional energy pulled out of me. That situation leads to burnout, resentment, and bitterness. As a matter of self-care, I have to find people who are restorative and spend time with them in order for me to claw my way back to a place where I can be more free with my emotional energy. It’s a form of resilience to recognize this and be intentional with who I interact with, and it counteracts the situations and relationships that I’m obligated to be in that are stressful or draining.
#4 Be generous in your privilege
This year has been a series of lessons in recognizing my own privilege. But this isn’t necessarily something to be ashamed of; it is instead a call to action. As Uncle Ben says in Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Responsibility means making decisions about how to invest my money and my time in ways that help improve the lives of those who didn’t have the same kind of advantages as I had growing up.
I shared a little bit about what this looked like recently, and count it as one of the most important life lessons I learned this year.
#5 Live in a posture of thanksgiving
I received a letter in the mail from the local utility company in the spring saying that they would be replacing the water main outside my house. It outlined the activities that would be involved, and mentioned that I would receive a notice when they actually turned the water off for the one day they would need to do so to switch over to the new water source.
Almost predictably, that was not what happened. My water went out for hours at a time without any notice during the month of construction, and I’d only realize it after I flushed a toilet or tried to turn the faucet handle. Months later, I’m still kind of amazed that clean water comes out of the faucet when I turn it on.
Up until this point, living in a posture of thanksgiving was thinking: “Wow, this special thing happened! I’m so thankful!” But now, I’m truly thankful for the mundane, the things we take for granted. I am incredibly thankful my toilet flushes. I’m thankful I have reliable transportation. I’m thankful for a safe place to live and food to eat.
With the basics in place, everything else seems like a luxury. This single experience helped me live through this time of shelter-in-place mostly with a feeling of abundance, not as one of loss. I’m still feeling the grief and anxiety has permeated our society for the past ten months or so, but I’ve also been recognizing just how blessed I am to have so many little luxuries.
#6 Find joy in the mundane
One of the side effects of spending so much time at home has been the effect of slowing down. Earlier this spring, I was doing some yard work and came to the realization that the rose tree in the yard was blooming. I forced myself to stop being busy and literally stop and smell the roses. I squished my nose into a rose that was half the size of my face. I admired the beauty of the flower. (Yeah, I posted it to Instagram.)
This experience reminded me to take a moment to simply experience the present instead of being worried about the future or agonizing over the past. There is beauty in the mundane experiences of daily life — petting a cat, having a phone conversation with a friend, listening to music while doing the dishes.
#7 Be faithful where you are planted
This has been a theme in my life for the past couple of years. When things weren’t going the way I expected, I’ve stopped and reflected on the single question: “What does it look like to be faithful where I’m planted?” What does it look like to be faithful in the current circumstances? This year has been incredibly dynamic; activities and groups that I had been participating in ground to a halt and shifted focus. I had to say goodbye to certain things and pause others.
But I did so with the expectation that there would be other opportunities to show up and invest my time in things that are equally as rewarding. The activities I gave up in the spring turned into time that I could invest in others in career mentoring and spend on creative projects like a killer retrospective music video and a quick Christmas song edit for a nonprofit music school.
I don’t want to minimize the amount of suffering that we have been through, both individually and as a global society. There have been many people who have lost incredibly important people to them to this deadly disease. Families are stressed and exhausted, marriages strained, individuals lonely and isolated. Inequities abound. BIPOC people have had an overwhelming number of stressors this year.
But these life lessons borne out of grief, stress, and anxiety remind me that even the scars of a hard year can be redeemed. The human experience is an eternal paradox of blessing and suffering — sometimes in cycles, often at the same time. It’s in this paradox that I remember that this, too, shall pass.
Here’s to a better 2021 for all of us.
Photo by Bob van Aubel on Unsplash
Elaine is a senior product manager at Adobe. You can find her on Twitter at @elainecchao. All statements in this essay are her own and do not reflect the opinions of her employer.
