Bring on 2024
Happy New Year!
I keep saying one day I’ll start a blog, one day I’ll be consistent with it. So one of my new years resolutions is to post consistently - once per week starting off - and see where it goes. This, friends, is my public announcement for the sake of accountability.
I reflected this morning on life lessons I’ve gleaned from 2023 that I’d like to carry with me into the new year:
Miracles DO happen
Intuition is NEVER wrong
There is NOTHING I can’t do
Life is TRULY what you make it
Let’s dive deeper…
Miracles do happen. In May 2022 my mother was told by a doctor she only had a few months left to live. The fact that she made it to Christmas 2022 was a miracle, and guess what? She’s still kickin’. She made it all the way to New Years 2024, and she’s in good spirits despite her daily health battles.
Watching her story has been nothing short of astonishing, and this year we witnessed a miraculous moment even more superhuman than the one from 2022. Sorry to be vague, but I can’t go into detail here - not until I have a better connection with my reader community. If ever we chat in person, though, ask for the story and I will happily share.
Suffice it to say, I believe in miracles because I’ve witnessed them first hand.
Intuition is never wrong. Summer 2023, my intuition had never been stronger. I had a bad feeling about a situation I was in. So bad in fact that my “gut feeling” manifested into severe stomach pain that rendered me unable to eat for several days. Despite this very obvious physical cue to change the situation, I only continued on until the apex of the situation landed me in a foreign country with a stranger. My mother went to the ER the day after I landed and I cut the trip short (turning the whole thing into a rather expensive and tedious endeavor).
The problem for me wasn’t about listening to my intuition myself; it was convincing everyone else I was correct. I deliberately disobeyed what I knew I needed in order to appease everyone else.
Foolish, silly, will never do again.
There is nothing I can’t do. I had a flickering of this thought after I gave a TEDx Savannah talk back in May. I really knew it to be true, though, at an Inti Raymi festival in Otavalo, Ecuador. I bathed in a waterfall at midnight with shamans. They hit me with herbs, as per their annual tradition worshipping the Sun god. I stood nearly naked in frigid water and 50 degree air while a woman I’d just met whacked me with a sharp branch of ortiga. They joked in Spanish that I was too skinny to be American, and the local film crew interviewed me, curious why a foreigner was partaking in this indigenous tradition. Afterwards, I put on freshly purchased alpaca poncho and it really hit me: if I can do that, there is nothing I can’t do.
Life is truly what you make it. Thoughts are things. It sounds cliche (because it is cliche), but cliches are cliches for a reason: because they’re true. It matters not at all how stinky your circumstance is; it matters how you relate to it.
Is it the end of the world or a new opportunity? Are they being mean or bringing to light your own insecurities for you to process and heal?
My primary resolution for 2024 is to continue to feel peace despite external circumstances. There will always be problems…and there will always be blessings. The fun part is we get to choose what we see and how we see it.
I’d also like to give myself more grace and forgiveness while having fun growing into the person I know I’m meant to become. Even as I write this, I must constnatly remind myself to stop dwelling on silly thoughts: thoughts like, “I need to edit this, make it perfect before I post”, “why would anyone read this?”, “I’m not giving enough detail”, “why give detail? no one cares to read about my life”, etc etc.
Rather, I am now making a public commitment to doing it anyway, feeling peace despite my internal naysayers, and embracing life for what it IS, not what I think it should be.
What are your life lessons from 2023 and resolutions for 2024? I’d love to hear!