What You Should Be Focusing On Now
The Environment, Your Mental Well-Being, Protecting Humanity
The other day I had the pleasure of talking to someone I would deem "real," meaning that they were not afraid to look at themselves and see how they have impacted their life and others in sometimes negative ways and confess it openly to other people. A real person is willing and beginning to work to improve the areas in their lives that they see need help. Almost everyone wants to better themselves, but few are ready to be honest and start the hard work of changing.
Why am I bringing this up?
We have been experiencing ongoing trauma and turmoil since the start of 2020. Long-term trauma causes all types of problems: Persistent fatigue, sleep disorders, nightmares, fear of recurrence, anxiety, depression, and avoidance of emotions, or you might start participating in activities like drinking to numb the trauma. It's no wonder that we now have a global mental health crisis.
Our way out is to learn to focus only on the things that matter.
What matters?
What you are becoming matters; notice that is different than saying you matter because you had no choice in deciding if you were born, but you have a choice in what you do and accomplish while you are here.
How are you showing up in the world, or are you even choosing to show up? This is the time in history when you must be awake because the future requires you to make a decision. You must decide now what you believe and how you plan to show it in your actions in your daily life. For example, if you say that you care about people, are you listening to your neighbor when they say hello, or are you willing to reach out and welcome them to the community? If you say you care about clean air, are you walking to places when you don't need to drive? It's these simple actions that are building you into the person the world sees. What I mentioned is not hard; you don't have to fly to a third-world country to do something extraordinary to showcase who you are becoming. It's the everyday choices and actions that will tell the story.
Working on your well-being is crucial to have clarity about what you stand for. You must take care of yourself in these times like never before; exercising and eating right is not enough. Go and purchase a journal or use a notebook and jot down your thoughts regularly. Pay attention to how you feel as you are writing. Once you have finished, go back a few weeks later and see if the things you wrote about changed or if you learned anything since you wrote down what was going on in your head. The purpose is to find out if you are growing. Growth is essential for a healthy mindset and overall well-being; it's why you are on this planet. Start here before thinking about anything else.
Once you are on your well-being journey, it's time to look outward at the environment we are creating on this planet. It's a mess. There has been an environmental crisis almost every week since the start of the pandemic. Places in the world that have never experienced flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, locust swarms, and volcanic eruptions are becoming commonplace. Let's step back and examine how we may be contributing to these problems to move forward. Saving our environment is vital for obvious reasons; we need to have a planet to live on safely.
Finally, our humanity needs protecting. Technology is incredible; it allowed us all to keep operating when the world shut down. We were able to host video chats, continue working, learn how to cook new foods, and start to build our businesses.
Technology has given us the ability to put the world in a box called our cell phone, and it has brought us to a crossroads in life, having to decide if we will face reality. Many of us have escaped and started to create our worlds online, thinking that if I am okay, you're okay, but that is not true. We are losing touch with each other, reinforcing lies as truths, and leaving our young to figure out life alone. Let's remember how we got here and how special we are in this galaxy.
Right Now, it is important to know what time it is on the planet. It's time to make a decision.
