It’s been easy to lose a sense of oneself during the last 18 months.
Dealing daily with new information, processing fast-changing and sometimes frightening news and information, adapting to meet new social requirements and negotiating with our (sometimes strong) feelings when we perceive someone else to be breaking the rules, or choosing a very different path through Covid to our own.
All of this has been exhausting and required hitherto untested levels of compassion, patience and acceptance.
We’ve all done it and coped magnificently (nothwithstanding the occasional blip or meltdown – we are human after all).
Now, as we emerge from lockdown into something freer, but not quite free, we can ask ourselves what we want the coming months and years to look like.
If lockdown life showed us what we didn’t want any more, post lockdown life is asking what exactly you would like to put back into your days.
We are all simply human, but the way in which we choose to express that humanity is very individual and wonderful: we have the gift of creation and we create in myriad unique ways.
Rediscovering this side of yourself post lockdown warrants some of your time and focus. Who are you? What do you need to be happy? How do you intend to express yourself over the next few years?
I find these much more useful questions than the classic What Are You Going to Do with Your Life? as it leaves space for so much more than the grand life-changes that in truth happen to us only once or twice in a lifetime.
Asking instead how you intend to express yourself gives you much more scope for the small joyful elements that make up a fulfilling life.
So along with your day job, you might express yourself by having a stronger, fitter body. Along with being mother to young children, you might express yourself through writing that daily journal, or swimming every week. You get the drift. You express yourself through whatever you bring to the world, whether that is a smile on a mountain top, a knitted hat, a cake, a safe haven for others, beautiful things to look at or being a good friend. It all has value and all it needs is that you know yourself and be yourself.
Perhaps, as I discovered last weekend, the essentials have not changed and it feels so joyous and restoring to be able to embrace them again. I love mountains, looking at art, learning and the ocean. To express myself fully I choose all of these things. And now I am allowed to do them again. Yippee.