It is already December, and a very unusual year is coming to its end. Many historians claim that the year 2020 will be studied and considered a historic year due to the changes and innovations that it will bring to humanity trajectory. But this text is not to talk about it!
This text is to talk about how 2020 will certainly be a year remembered by each person who lived it; for me who write these words, and for you, reader, who in your busy life, took a moment to share these reflections with me.
In the midst of each historical singularity that composes and constitutes us, it is possible to say that we will all bring in common this mark that 2020 represents. Our experience, however, is unique. What we live and how we apprehend each experience is a book whose only reader to master is yourself.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The other day, in my conversations with my mother, she called 2020 the “lost year”. I believe that she might not be the only one to think this way. From the constant stresses of trying to maintain a life in a world in which not seeing the family starts to represent an act of love and locking yourself in the house an act of solidarity; the challenges and resilience to withstand the daily news and uncertainties that brought us to an obscure prison of worries; mourning for all the plans not lived and for all “what if…?” left adrift in our imagination; the mourning for all those we have lost … In fact, the prevailing wish may be to erase 2020 from our memories.
How to stay healthy in the midst of this? We can vary the circumstances, the moment, the intensity, the frequency, but we share the tears that we have certainly shed at some point this year.
Well, dear reader, if you have come this far in the expectation that this text would culminate in an answer, I am sorry to disappoint you. Especially because I am also still in the process of discovering them. But I think that this is the first point that perhaps it is interesting to emphasize here in this brief dialogue: feeling good is a process, not a given state. A process that extends through life, and of which this text, this year, and our tears are constituent parts – and not antagonists as we often think. It is, therefore, a process that, to a large extent, is beyond our control. We were thrown into the world and living it is confusing, and sometimes we see ourselves putting all our effort to navigate invincible currents.
However, we are not mere passive agents waiting to have the future determined and driven by the instabilities of the world. We have the possibility to act in the world, to transform it, and allow ourselves to be transformed by it. We authorize and influence, to a lesser or greater extent, the changes that will occur with us.
I do not come by means of these words to instigate naive speech or superficial self-help. I do not speak with the property of a psychologist, therapist, doctor, or any professional specialized in the subject. I speak merely as someone who lived this year, and who reflects in an attempt to understand it, even though the prior fact is that full understanding will never be achieved.
Considering, then, that feeling good is a process, and that we have our share of action on this process, what can we do? There is no universal recipe, something that will work for everyone and for all the problems in the world. It is necessary to know yourself, to give space to silence and to listen to oneself, to experiment, and to be affected by the other and by the most diverse experiences.
Self-care is an important part of this process and of our active involvement in it. Among the various forms of self-care, choose the one that best represents you – it can be the music you like, the small pleasures experienced daily, the significant encounters that constitute us, the various possible therapies that we can attend, healthy eating habits, physical activity practice, or even the brief disconnection from social networks. It is, above all, allowing yourself to be heard by someone else, allowing yourself to accept that everything does not have to be okay and that perhaps help is needed. It is remembering that we are not alone, no matter how strong this thought can be sometimes.
The possibilities are many. None of them has a universal and immediate effect, and this is essential to be highlighted. They are small movements in a continuous process that extends throughout life. In this process, self-knowledge represents one of the greatest resources for facing what the world brings us. A theorist once said that life is movement; it is this constant and endless dialectic of oppositions and syntheses that makes life “alive”. Illness, in turn, is the negation of this movement. Let us therefore not deny what 2020 has brought to us. Let us take care of ourselves and of those close to us. And then, perhaps, we are a little more ready to look back at 2020, and all the suffering we experienced during it, not as a lost year, but as a year in which each of us lived difficult and unique processes of our lives, which will leave marks that we have already incorporated, without even realizing it, as part of us. And it’s only up to us to know how to heal them.
VHMOR wishes everyone a good New Year!
