A friend sent a quote to me the other day and one line stood out from all the rest – I’ll tell you what it was in a moment, but first I just wanted to say...

I know we're all sick of hearing about it – but I wanted to talk about the elephant in the room and the fact that 2020 has been a challenging year for everyone.

Some people are being faced with scary life situations, health or financial, or both. Some families are separated by closed borders and cancelled flights. Certainly here in Australia where we've only just opened some of our internal state borders, and our international borders remain firmly shut.

Then there are others who seem to be weathering this situation well. On the outside. But on the inside, it’s a different story.

I’m one of those. So far I’ve been lucky, my income did wobble a bit early on, but, really, I haven’t suffered financially. I live in an area of Australia that has not been affected much by this virus either – so no health scares. My lifestyle is such that I didn’t really get affected by closures of pubs and gyms and other restrictions – although I did nearly run out of toilet paper early on when everyone was stockpiling.

So I haven’t suffered. Yet I still feel a sense of unease, and slightly depressed, partly because I don’t know when I will see my family and friends overseas again, but also it’s just a pervading sense of bleh… nothing to look forward to, and I feel I don’t have the right to feel that way.

Recently I realised that a lot of others are feeling this too. The thing is, when this all started we were ‘all in this together’, we were united nationally and globally and we imagined how we could use this opportunity to change our ways, to care for our planet and stop the incessant greed that is trying to destroy it. Pictures of wildlife emerging and pollution clearing abounded on the internet. We were on Zoom calls here there and everywhere, supporting each other through this. But slowly we’ve become tired and just fed up with it all, and, in many cases, depressed.

My point is, we are all being affected by this global pandemic, even if we’ve survived physically and financially so far. And because of my own experience, I realised there is a tendency if you haven’t suffered a big loss of some kind, to feel guilty about feeling down.

The biggest source of unhappiness, dissatisfaction and even fear is always living in the future – planning, controlling and manipulating to get what we want at some later moment in time. But what I realised is that when we can’t plan anything (because who knows what's round the corner, right?) it also leads to this loss of direction and sort of pointlessness to it all. So there has to be a different way to go about life – and I think that right now we’ve been presented with one of the best opportunities we might ever have of finding out what that is – and actually living it.

So what does that look like? 

It's nothing new - Eckhart Tolle has been talking about it for ages.  It's living in the present moment. Letting go of our continuous addiction to forward-planning, of trying to control outcomes, because we can’t do that right now anyway.

So in order to take advantage of this gift from the Universe, we need to change our perspective. Which brings me back to that line that stood out in the quote my friend sent me:


Right now we might not have an ‘an infinite array of choices’, but we still do have the ability to choose the one that ‘alone brings happiness’ – to love what is. This means not living in the future, but taking notice of what you have right here, right now and allow that to be enough.

This is the gift the Universe has presented us with, if we’re willing to see it. We have the real-life opportunity to practise what many of us blithely talk about but often don’t do – love what is, live in the now and give up clinging to the future, missing the present moment that is so precious.

And the first step is to acknowledge your feelings of discomfort and sadness when they arise – and know that you are allowed to feel this way no matter what your outward experience is. 

But at the same time let’s not forget all the good intentions we had at the start of this pandemic and use this opportunity the Universe has given us to live in the moment and cherish it.