I thought this last blog post of the year should be about the quality of our response when we are faced with a major confrontation in life since it was so central to this past year for all of us as well as my memoir Love Trust Gratitude Healing: Turning a Battle into a Dance and making Peace with Cancer and because I believe it was key to my healing spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Getting cancer isn’t fair. It lands on us and we are forever changed. How we change depends largely on how we respond to this unfairness. No one would blame us if we responded in fear and anger or resignation and depression after all they can only imagine what we’re going through.
In 2020 we were all subjected to a major confrontation in the form of Covid19 and the quality of responses was all over the place. Trump had one of the worst responses and as a nation we paid dearly. First there was denial (a common response people have to a cancer diagnosis as well) followed by magical thinking, “It will just disappear on its own” There was a lot of minimizing going on, “It’s no worse then the flu”
Among these poor quality responses we saw the priorities of corporations and institutions to preserve themselves and the economy at the expense of people. I read that over the course of 2020 seven trillion dollars was dumped into the stock market to prop it up and less than a trillion to prop up the people and small businesses — talk about a low quality response.
We also witnessed the high quality response to the pandemic among front line workers who worked tirelessly and continually in the face of their own vulnerability and exposure to this dreadful virus. So many thousands worked honorably despite many lacking a livable wage. The response to the murder of George Floyd was overwhelmingly high quality though not so much among law enforcement and the looters. Tens of thousands risked their health and physical safety to stand up and say enough is enough.
What will 2021 bring us? Of course we have no idea but we’ll do well to remember that there are few negative experiences in life that can’t be turned positive just as there are few positive experiences that can’t be turned negative. We are the deciding factor because it always comes down to the quality of our response. Wishing you all the very best in the coming new year. Love + Trust + Gratitude = Healing.