You are ready..... for anything!
Susan Grandfield • 26 June 2020
Whether you realise it or not, you are a different person now and you are ready for anything!
Take yourself back to February of this year. If someone had told you what the next 3 months of your life were going to be like, what would you have said?
Perhaps something along the lines - “That sounds like the script for a movie!” or “Ha ha, very funny!” or “That sounds like the stuff of nightmares”!
Go forward one month to March when lockdown was first announced. How did you feel? What was going through your mind? How did you respond?
Many people, including myself, thought (and hoped) it would be relatively short lived and we’d be “back to normal” in a week or two. There was a mix of fear, confusion, anger, anxiety, curiosity and even a bit of excitement as people tried to make sense of what lockdown meant for them and the implications of it.
Bring yourself back to today.......
- What is different for you now than it was back in February?
- What is better?
- What have you achieved that surprises you?
- What has shifted or changed in ways you want to continue?
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase about hindsight being a wonderful thing and it really is!
The point is that human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt and adjust and make the best of a situation. When forced into a set of circumstances that strip us of our familiar patterns, habits and ways of doing things we somehow find a way to adapt. When the rules of the game change and the fog descends, we have to find new ways to navigate our way through each day. And that is what you have done.
Have you paused to notice that yet?
There are things that you have been doing over the past 3 months which have enhanced your life, your relationships, your wellbeing and your perspective on life. In amongst the challenges (and let’s face it there have been plenty of those!) you have found ways to keep yourself, your family, your friends, your colleagues, your community connected, happy, engaged and nourished.
Take a moment to acknowledge that.
Now, take yourself into the future. I don’t know how far into the future, it may be a month, a year or 10 years, but at some point there will be another crisis for you to deal with. It may not be a global pandemic and it may not have the same implications nor affect as many people as Covid-19 has, however, in your life there will be something else that happens which has the potential to turn your world upside down.
But it doesn’t have to.
You have lived through something which you will tell your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews about for years to come and yes, you’ll talk about the difficulties and the challenges (who could forget the international toilet roll shortage!) but you will also talk about how you coped, how you adapted and the good things that you experienced.
So…..I urge you to acknowledge how your resilience and ability to adapt to challenges has grown and strengthened over the past few months. Stop right now. Take a few moments to appreciate what good has come out of the lockdown for you and commit to something you will take forward as a significant and important change you will continue as a gift from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Please share your stories, experiences and learning in the comments below.
What do you need help with?
Part 4 - the way forward In this final part of the series, we are looking at the way forward. What does this awakening mean and how do we stay on the path that we’ve started to walk down?
This is an invitation to be curious about the freedom that comes from finally letting go of the need to fit in, to embrace how you see the world and how you want to approach life and the ripple effect that can have on the lives of those around you. It is all about self-acceptance and allowing.
The struggle of an idealist in a world of pessimists, pragmatists and realists is that at times it can feel very lonely, like we’re sitting on the edge of the crowd not being invited into the conversation. Everyone is looking in one direction and when we point out that there is another direction they could look in we feel dismissed, not heard and ridiculed for romantic notions about the world. But it doesn't have to feel that way.
Idealist: “Someone who believes that very good things can be achieved, often when this does not seem likely to others”. Rather than hiding away, agreeing with others, making myself wrong for holding a more hopeful view of the world or criticising myself for being naïve I backed myself and stood behind my beliefs.
We are under the misapprehension that we need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone if we really want to experience life and be successful. But that is not true. Finding our way back to our comfort zone is a vital part of experiencing life with more ease, enjoyment and freedom.
The reality of life is that we forget and fall into the predictable traps of the ego and its susceptibility to the outside world but that finding our way back to inner peace and stability comes from remembering that our experience is created from the inside.
We are incredibly talented at creating fictitious stories about ourselves and going through life without editing them, updating them or realising we can actually re-write them. Discovering how quickly life can change when you start to pay attention to your stories.
We begin this adventure of a lifetime as wide open, expansive, creative, loving, curious and innately wise little beings full of possibility, potential and optimism. But through our experience of interacting with others and the world around us we, unconsciously, wrap ourselves up in patterns of behaving and thinking which serve to protect us from the perceived risk of following that childlike energy. Now is the time to "unwrap" those protective layers and reconnect with who we really are.
Experimenting is fundamentally about trying things out and not being attached to a particular outcome. It is about giving things a go and learning from whatever happens. There is a real freedom in approaching things with an experimental mindset and I believe it can be brought to all aspects of our lives.
Like me, are you also someone who tends to plan moments of bliss rather than allow them to happen?
Ridiculous as that may sound, I realise that when I am in my familiar environment doing familiar and routine activities I tend to plan for moments of bliss or joy to happen sometime in the future, when all of the things I need to do have been done. I am discovering the possibility of experiencing moments of bliss at any time and without the preplanning.
