2020: it’s all about the perspective
Tags: Positive Thinking, Personal Development, 2020, Encouragement, Perspective

Photo by Gabriel Uchida (https://www.instagram.com/uchidagabriel/)

I am so grateful for 2020; the best year of my life. I got the chance of my life and I didn’t want to lose it.

Of course, I feel privileged, because, even under such unforeseen circumstances, I got the opportunity to keep working from home, as I was deeply concerned for the ones who didn’t get to enjoy the same privilege. It wasn’t easy still, with lots of adjustments and reconsiderations. Well, that’s all part of the process. Despite the difficulties, I never put my head down, and I hope you’ll never do too.

Due to the nature of my work, in the last fifteen years, I had spent a significant amount of time away from my loved ones. I never realized how much time I was gone until I sat down to look back to realize I was gone over 200 days combined just the last 5 years alone. Those were years I had traveled the least. I don’t even want to remember the years before that. With the pandemic, I saw a chance, and I was determined to capitalize on it.

I know times are difficult and the extremism in our society tends to set us apart rather than bring us together, but the change must start within ourselves. We got an opportunity to “stop” or at least “slow down” our busy lives, and we had a chance to reevaluate everything surrounding ourselves. It was about our perspective, and how we saw things. For me, it was all about the “glass half full “ approach.

In the beginning, it was the fear, about the uncertainty of what was going to happen. Shortly after, the “get it together stage”, and that’s where I started to realize this time was so precious. I get to train sports with my kids every day. No, I am not a coach, and one of my biggest weaknesses is the lack of patience, which is crucial to be a successful parent, and in this case a great coach. That was my chance, to work on something I need to do to become a better human being. Priceless daily time together with them, working on training sessions, where their fitness level got better (after all, we have logged more than 10,000 workout minutes over the course of the last nine months). That was beyond the point to me, as I was really appreciative that I got to spend precious time with them.

Later on, it came to the realization stage. We soon realized it was going to take a while to go back to our ‘normal’ lives. What’s normal, anyway? Would we ever go back to the way we used to live? Certainly, there were positive things about how we were living, but I am confident to say many of us learned a new flexible way to live our lives and there are tons of positive things we were not acquainted with before. I sure tried my best to adapt, and I managed to accomplish things professionally and personally I thought I would not be able to. What a great rewarding feeling it is to find new ways to do things.

Perhaps your view of this pandemic is different from mine, and I am fine with it as I am not leaving your life and I don’t know what you are going through. My only intention here was to bring you a positive perspective about this pandemic, as my way of thinking five or ten years ago might have been different from the one I have today. I know it sounds paradoxical to say there is a positive side of things in a pandemic, but if it wasn’t for my faith in God and thanks to the support of my wife, I wouldn’t be here today to say I learned to be careful with what I think, because our thoughts run our lives. If you think 2020 was your ‘rock-bottom’, aka, the worst year of your life, that’s okay. Just remember there is no better place to start rebuilding your life up than having a strong foundation to support it, and there is no better place to start building something up than from the bottom upwards.

In 2021, I challenge you to be the best you could every day of your life. Ultimately, like Aristotle’s once said, “you are what you repeatedly do”, so start now to think positively and be the best version of yourself. Rest assured I am trying to be the best I can be and I hope my simple word of encouragement may help you push it through. Just stand strong, have no worries, and be confident that better times will come no matter how rough the ride is, just never give up. Make a difference and be kind; it’s always about your perspective.