I don’t think anyone will look back on 2020, and say that this was a great year. Most people are in agreement that this was a pretty bad year.
I remember being struck with intense fear during the first week South Africa went into lockdown. I wasn’t fearful of anything in specific, except maybe the uncertainty of what was going to happen. Usually I can pull myself out of fear. I just need some awareness that I’m only feeling fear and that it’s not the truth of what might happen. But this year was different. The fear seemed justified somehow. More real. One might even argue that it was. But when I look back on it now, none of those terrible future projections came true. None. Yes, there was discomfort and uncertainty. A vast sense of isolation. And for many, many people financial difficulty. At one point, I was convinced that the global pandemic was some weird Armageddon—which strangely enough made me feel better about everything, because if today is all you have, who cares about the future. I can smile about that now, but I wasn’t laughing in those first few months of 2020. But things changed.
It was around the middle of the year that I stopped waiting for things to get better. I decided I was no longer going to focus my attention on what was going on in the world, or where the abysmal trajectory would lead in the end. I decided to just focus on what I was doing. No more fretting about the news and the incompetence of people in authority positions. No more mindlessly scanning the internet and social media for opinions on what was going on. I re-focused on those things that centred me: meditation, writing, and being present with whatever is. It took a few weeks, but things shifted in a big way. Not only internally, but eventually externally as well. In general I felt less frustrated and less reactive. Lockdown rules relaxed and overall things seemed to improve. You could argue that it was just a perspective change, or it might have been something more tangible, but either way, the world no longer seemed so hostile and hopeless.
It was during these last few months of 2020 that I realised consistency in my own habits and an awareness of my own internal discomfort are much more important than whatever is going on in the world. These days, I accept things more readily and I don’t always distract myself from the discomfort. So finally, a difficult year brought a valuable lesson: Focusing on outer chaos can never bring inner peace—but cultivating inner peace seems to have a strange and beneficial effect on outer circumstances.