It certainly seems 2020 is a year of reckoning. We have been going from one unprecedented event to another. This is not only affecting our lifestyles but also shifting our consciousness and what we want from our lives. The lockdown alone was enough for us to give ourselves a serious rethinking of what our future goals and what we want things to look like going forward in our lives. But how are we going to realize these new goals as we shift back to our “normal” lives? It’s easy to make a bunch of plans and list our desires; the challenge comes from actually working through and achieving these new goals. Of course most large goals will not happen overnight and shifting a large goal to daily bite sized doses takes some extra planning (head over to our goal making articles here and here). But perhaps you haven't even gotten that far yet. Some of us ended up checking out a little bit emotionally during quarantine or allowed ourselves to be distracted with easy and fun projects. Some of us spent much needed quality time with family, others dealt with home improvement projects and even some worked more than ever before to keep up with growing demands on our jobs that the lock down caused.
Regardless of how we treated our time in lock down, we all can feel the shift that has occurred. The world is different now. Many of us are feeling that shift but are not sure how best to use this energy. So today we are going to focus on a meditation and writing exercise to set intention for our new life moving forward. We do not need to go back to our old lives and to the things that no longer serve us. We don't need to return to jobs that left us unfulfilled, relationships that hurt us more than helped us or even habits that were ultimately damaging for our well being. Even protests in the country, which despite your opinion on the matter, are different. People are coming out in greater numbers, pushing harder. It feels to me like everyone is looking at their lives and trying to really examine what they want from the world and how they want their lives to be. The problem is a lack of direction and focus. We all have the energy and desire right now, the veil has been lifted, but how to apply this energy is not so clear. It is not enough to have a desire for a good life or happiness, we have to define what these objectives mean for us and how we hope to go about achieving these desires.
So what I want you to do now is go to your favorite way to write, be it on your phone, a laptop or old fashioned pen and paper and write on the top of your page “What do I want to keep from Quarantine?” and set a timer for five minutes. Start writing out all the things you liked from your quarantine or if it works better for you to define in the negative, all the things you didn't like. Write out what you don't want returning to your life and what you don't want to lose that you have discovered. Try to keep writing for the whole five minutes and once your timer goes off look over your list. Interpret your lists based on patterns you see. This will be a very personal exercise so it will be largely up to you to define how you want to use the list you just made. It may serve as a blueprint for a new lifestyle or simply something you can keep as a reminder of what you want for your life.
Now on another sheet I want you to do the same thing with the question, “What is Happiness?”. Set a timer for 5 minutes and now start free style writing, try not to stop writing for the entirety of the 5 minutes. Define happiness for yourself, be it a scene or a food, a fiscal goal or a legacy you leave on this earth, nothing is off limits. Define happiness for your life exactly in your way. After the end of the five minutes look at your list of happiness items. If you want to sort them now you may, but it isn't necessary. What we are looking for is what are the things you need in your life in order to achieve these happinesses. Maybe it is something as simple as giving yourself a few hours on the weekend to be alone, maybe it is more complicated like starting a large scale project. Likely, you will have differing levels of complexity, and many of which can be accomplished right now with very little effort on your part. Start with these easy happinesses, such as watching a sunset or having a date with a loved one once a week, and make the effort to give yourself this happiness several times a month. It is important to make time for these regardless of how well you feel you are doing with your life. I see many people rewarding and punishing themselves based off of what goals they have or have not accomplished and while self discipline is important, denial of happiness is not the way.
Once you have these two lists you can use them in a myriad of ways or do nothing at all. Sometimes it is enough just to voice these feelings, and the exercise has already served you. Sometimes you need to take it further and use them to create actionable steps. If you want to reverse engineer a plan for your life with these lists you certainly can, simply follow our how to goal set here. Once you are done with the exercise you can choose to continue with a mindfulness session, perhaps meditating on what you just learned about yourself or you may end it here and move along with your day. The important thing here is that you note the change that we all have experienced and have set an intention on what you plan to do with your life and happiness moving forward.
What do you miss from your old life? What will you miss from lockdown? We would love to hear your quarantine experiences and any comments or questions at info@bullionite.com.