How much time have I given to worry this year?

This question woke me up in the middle of the night on Tuesday, at last weaving each nagging thread of anxiety into a mental tapestry of 2020. I couldn’t quantify an answer but I typed text expander length bullet points of the daily and weekly concerns I found myself always reacting too, indenting under each thought to elaborate on why.

As I wrote, the jumble of short term priorities and endless mental pinball games coalesced into a few bigger problems to solve or opportunities to seize. Fear gave way to clarity and I began to see the path out of the wild woods I’d grown with each seed of doubt planted this year.

Each worry was perpetuated by an ungrounded feeling, a resistance to thinking about longterm solutions when so much of this year was lived in the uncertain day to day. Fear. Scared people don’t make the best decisions (see: every horror movie ever) so rather than tackling these concerns from the highest point of leverage, I tried to make a little progress on each each day, rarely moving forward, occasionally falling further behind.

The clarity I sought didn’t come through teaching or working or reading. It came at the tail end of 4.5 days of rushing free rest. Rest I fought against but finally gave into as I think we all do this time of year, remembering for a few moments that when the tank is empty there can be no doing without being.

Rest gave me renewed energy to see every problem as an opportunity to improve. Yesterday I returned to work and upgraded my hatred of email to a system for better email management. I setup rules and automations, saved templates and finally created tags to move all 296 of my “I’ll definitely read this later” newsletters into a reading list folder. Suddenly how do I get to Inbox 0 everyday? became easy to answer.

2020 took so much from us but it gave us so much too. It gave me the chance to explore a new dimension of motherhood homeschooling 5.5yo, to strengthen friendly and familial ties hundreds of miles apart, to work to the point of burnout and figure out how to recover from it, to step into my power as a leader and black woman, and to practice presence and grace I didn’t know I was capable of. My wish for all of us is to give more time to hope than worry next year, to remain open to good and, no matter what happens, continue to look up and forward, choosing our mindset everyday.

Sending you love and light and best wishes for the new year ahead,