The Myth That This Year Was a Total Waste
Did your goals get waylaid? Maybe that’s a good thing. Let’s talk.
This morning I read a headline that spoke to the growing cognitive dissonance of so many. I won’t list it here out of respect for the author but I will speak to the issue: she’s tired of being told to be grateful.
I’m not going to say that’s hateful, but I respectfully disagree. However, she has a point. If I may.
This year has been a righteous bitch for just about everyone I know, and billions more I don’t. What differentiates the survivors from the thrivers is what I want to address here.
I began the year, perhaps as many did, with a list of things I wanted to accomplish. Many I’d been planning for years, like selling my home and moving to another state. Some were what I always plan, like major adventure travel, which is my work. Others, well, getting laid might have been on that list but like many pipe dreams, I am left to dream about pipes instead.
My apologies.
No, I’m not sorry. I need humor. We all do, if for no other reason than humor trumps heartbreak every single time, and it’s one of the few things that you and I can count on no matter what happens to us. It really is life’s superpower.
While on one hand I totally get it that Covid and quarantine are tough, I’d like to see if I can tease out a little sanity. I will refrain from being overly Pollyanna, which annoys me sometimes as well. I will do my best to explain why being regularly appreciative and mindful of what’s right not only helps our sanity, but most certainly offers the rare bit of grace in a world which seems rather short of it.
Truth is, the world always has been and always will be full of grace. The challenge has ever been to see it, to find it within ourselves (we are endless potential sources of same) and to share it with others.
If you want to see an example of grace, kindly, here’s one from the world stage. The UN World Food Programme just won the Noble Peace Prize. At a time when the most vulnerable are made more so, and as a result, so are all the world’s endangered species, this is a step in the right direction when so much of the world is speeding backwards.
But I digress.
Why was that important?Because they have been focused and singularly pointed in their work. That’s how you achieve great things.
My goals this year were based on what I knew at the time, just like all of us. I don’t plan for pandemics.
Other than those folks who’ve been telling us that one is coming for decades, I mean, who does, right?
However, I do allow for shitstorms. Life is full of them, guaranteed. For some it’s a life-threatening illness. Others, it’s an horrific car accident (I had onna those this year myself) or being evicted or losing a job. I’ve never been evicted (other than out of a relationship, which is bad enough) I have had a car repossessed, so I think I can relate.
At 67, I’ve weathered my fair share of shitstorms. As an adventure traveler by trade and a journalist to boot, I seek them out. However, I don’t wander off to a mountaintop in cotton t-shirts and Keds. I go loaded for bear, with bear spray, and blizzard gear to beat the band even in summer, because high country sees snow year round. To see what the very best have to say about being prepared in my world, please see this from Outside Online:
Most people don’t bother, because after all, Search and Rescue’s just like Uber, right? Someone is allus gonna save us, right? Just in time, just like the movies, right?
Nope.
Being prepared used to be a girl and boy scout thing. Now it’s not a thing at all, which is, I think, one of the reasons we are where we are.
It’s hard to learn much if you and I are forever distracted. If we can stay focused we can build remarkable competence.
In other words, over the course of time, and the course of life, you learn, with any luck, to be flexible and adaptable enough to cope. And not just cope, but to learn those skills which allow you to ride the tsunami, not be crushed by it.
Does this apply to all of us? Of course not. Because not all of us want to learn to cope. Many are far too invested in being victims, in blaming, and in buying into the story that they are so much worse worse off than everyone else. Look, if that gets you what you want (pity, eyeballs, mass commiseration) have at it.
Along those lines I might point, as better writers than I am have done, to the front line folks who fared the worst, died in bigger numbers and continue dying in droves, and go on nevertheless to fight the good fight for others while living and trying to survive and thrive in difficult conditions. That’s another article, but you know damned well I’m largely discussing communities of color.
Some of us do have the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy covered, homes that are paid for or income which covers the mortgage or rent. We can choose where to shop and for what rather than to have to pick medicines or food. For many, the cost of healthcare has risen. This is just one example, and it doesn’t address how other drugs and services have gotten pricier for people barely managing to pay for what they already have on their plates:
So if you’re pissed because you’re bored (as Ellen Degeneres most unwisely commented that she felt imprisoned in her ten thousand square foot home, in a statement of utter tone deafness that did not sit well with fans), kindly. This article isn’t for you. It’s for those of us who are struggling to find some meaning in the meaningless. I have written about how to do this extensively, and I won’t bore you by listing those articles here. You can find them yourself. This is about how we use our noggin power.
The powerful act of taking stock of what is working, along with the inevitable human compulsion to complain about what we don’t have, isn’t just a Pollyanna focus to piss off our pissed off friends even further. It’s about where you and I focus our energy.
The fundamental power of attention is what I’m addressing here. This is not as simple as The Secret, which I bought years ago and promptly donated to Goodwill as patent rubbish. Decide you want perfect eyesight or a Beamer, voila. How 'bout I imagine a brand new set of my own teeth, Sparky? Right.
This isn’t that. This is recognizing just how much personal power we truly possess. That begins with focus. Attention.
Attention is where we focus our energy. Where we put our focus and our energy, grows. Period. It’s just that simple. That includes hate and outrage, just as it most certainly includes gratitude and grace.
Goals and good things don’t just manifest; we have to do the hard work, but if we get distracted, we don’t do the hard work.
What that looks like in real life
If I may, first, this from fellow Medium peep Anthony J. Yeung:
From his article:
Stop checking social media and consuming useless information first thing in the morning.
When people start the morning by consuming information, responding to messages, and checking previous notifications, they haven’t taken one step toward their goals and they’re already filling their mind with (mostly) useless, distracting stuff.
None of it will help them accomplish their biggest tasks.
All of it will weaken their potential for the day.
Never check your emails first thing in the morning.
He nailed it.
This is just part of the overall issue. I strongly recommend your reading his whole piece because he really nails how we screw up our entire day by beginning it with outrage, which is what can so often happen when we suck in the sewage.
Then, if you will please:
From the article:
For example, when we’re being mindful, we’re using our mind to monitor our mind, in order to keep our attention in a particular stance — noting with an equanimous awareness what is arising in the mind. If we start to be too concentrated, then mindfulness reminds us to break that trance of absorption and become mindful of what’s arising in the mind. If we start to daydream, which is another attentional stance, then we can bring back our awareness into the mindful mode of paying attention. So knowing the different modes of attention can help us maintain mindfulness itself.
Kindly. Most of us babble mindlessly about “mindfulness” without the slightest clue what that means, much less are we AWARE that we are both not mindful and that we are not AWARE that we have no clue. Both of those levels of meta-awareness come from real attention. It’s learned, earned, and can slip past us swiftly in today’s social media mindfuck.
Why is this important?
Again, what you focus on, grows. It blooms, including outrage. The more attention you give it, the more your attention acts like rain and sunshine on the blooms of collective discontent. Soon, your mind is so overwhelmed with ain’t it awful and outrage that there’s no room for sanity.
Or getting real work done.
Yet plenty of folks have. I see stories from other writers who have accomplished a great deal this year, despite Covid, despite personal loss, despite getting Covid themselves and struggling back to health.
My social media guy is one of those folks who did just that.
I just had lunch with my real estate agent here in Eugene. She’s been very busy selling houses. She’s had family get sick with Covid, but she plays tennis, attends to her exercise needs, and keeps right on getting up every day.
Like all of us she has bad days. Me too. We need permission to have a bad day.
Folks like my agent don’t waste much time focusing on the shitshow that is our country right now. They spend time asking what they could do, and if nothing other than vote, moved on to those things they could indeed do something about.
It is one thing to notice, then decide what, if anything, you’re going to DO. For in noticing, you do not have to get sucked into helpless outrage about things you can’t change. You CAN choose to not look at stuff like that, and you can also choose to ask what you are willing to do to make positive changes in your sphere of influence. That’s powerful, intimate, and energizing for those around you.
Again from the second article:
In general, I think what’s happening is that we’re paying less sustained attention to complex ideas, and we’re simplifying everything. It’s a little bit like what George Orwell described in 1984, with the propaganda ministry enforcing Newspeak, where on the one hand words meant something other than their conventional meanings (that’s already happening in politics: for example, “pacification” for “war”) and on the other hand, words disappeared. Words are disappearing — think of texting and Twitter — and with them the ability to pay sustained attention. People have more interruptions and distractions than was ever the case in human history. And it’s because of the seduction of our digital media and digital devices. They have their upside, definitely, but we also need to pay attention to this downside, because it has serious implications, particularly for children. We now have a first generation of kids growing up with this barrage of distractions as the new normal. We don’t know what it will do to their attentional capacity. Some of it may be good, some may be bad, some may be disastrous.
When I told my publisher I wanted to write a book on attention, the response was, “That’s great. Just keep it short.”
You and I don’t have to be trained out of our ability to develop mindfulness, but this is what we’ve allowed. When we’re under stress, it’s even more challenging, as we seek outlet after outlet: booze, drugs, sex, struggle porn, pouring out collective crap into other folks’ eyeballs (which really helps, thanks), anything to dissipate the pain, the triggers. So folks write about their shit which in turn triggers other folks' trauma.
Or they blast other folks’ heartfelt work with their toxic bitterness.
As my buddy Rosennab said the other day with her typical focused observational skills, you don’t have permission to spray your grafitti over someone else’s work.
The only real escape is one that is universally available: a quiet, inwardly- focused mind.
That takes work, discipline and real focus.
Those folks around me both in person and online who, despite all else, are having a remarkable year, have learned to juggle the hairballs and shit sandwiches handed them and get life done anyway.
None of us is lucky. None of us is rich. Not one of us has an easy life. We’ve lost loved ones, we’ve been ill ourselves. I got hospitalized with infected kidneys and kidney stones, then a week later flipped my car at 65 mph, then shortly after that was surrounded by wildfires in a state where that kind of fire “never happens.”
Right. And yeah I get stressed, did get stressed. Had a bad half day, found my funny, got up and kept running, so hard I fractured a toe. Put on a boot, kept running, and this morning I did an ass over teakettle in my driveway when my prosthetic caught and sent me flying. Tore my shirt and my elbow. I rolled up in one smooth movement, kept right on walking. (*tagging you Warren Nelson) My neighbors were hugely entertained, if they were up early enough (just wait til I start clearing my roof). Hurt like hell. Another funny story. You just keep going.
Every so often I go sit on the porch with Beth Bruno, whose lyrical work reminds me a lot of my other friend, Ann Litts. Beth isn’t aware that we’re sitting together; she’s on the East Coast and I’m on the West.
Beth and I are of an age, as is Ann, and Rosenna. Many of my closest friends are not of an age. Yet. We share something in common: we seek the Goddess in whatever way we best can. In this beautiful piece by Beth she explains why I chose to move to a house in the Oregon hills:
She echoes what the other writers above have said. Want sanity? Want to be able to focus and still get work done, goals achieved when the world is crumbling?
Put the phone down. Find a way to get outside. Even if it’s just on a rooftop.
By doing that this year I was able to, despite Covid: sell my house, move to Oregon, completely overhaul and change my life, lifestyle and community, start a brand new business with new logo, launch a new website. Make new friends, heal from injuries, find a new stable, gym, caregivers, and better identify new lanes to swim in for the next decade or so.
All that, and a great deal more, during Covid, despite hospitalization, that horrible car crash, massive fires up here in Oregon.
I put my phone down. I go outside. I renew my ability to focus. I wash the sewage out of my system.
I lost a few goals along the way. Fine. They weren’t mine to do this year. Sometimes the Goddess throws us a sucker punch to say, Just. STOP.
Ann writes regularly about the field of fucks she once tended. And how few of them she tends any more. There aren’t many that are worth it, certainly not given the useless energy of helpless outrage at the cost of our ability to have a life.
Pay attention. Focus. Stop picking up every shiny thing (bad habit I have). Rosenna says, don’t pick it up, don’t put it down.
Put the phone down.
Until you do, the world, and everyone online,owns you, your time, your life, and your ability to live life on your terms. Want to make your goals?
Go outside.
Relearn how to focus. If you possibly can, forest bathe. It’s no accident that it’s a major thing in Japan.
From Beth:
Gladys Taber writes, “It is good to listen, not to voices but to the wind blowing, to the brook running cool over polished stones, to bees drowsy with the weight of pollen. If we attend to the music of the earth, we reach serenity, and then, in some unexplained way, we share it with others.
And wouldn’t it be a fine world, then, if instead of traumatizing others with our triggers, we can indeed focus on what we can be thankful for. Then we really can soothe, heal, uplift others.
A lesson I need to constantly re-learn like everyone else. But I am focusing on it.
