It’s a bit unreal how many drafts I have started and saved but not completed, much less posted. I finally felt the words start to flow again and glanced back at the blog to see April 2019 staring back at me. My initial thought was, “Ah, of course, right before everything changed.”
And that was a jarring thought because I’ve never stopped and parsed out the last year of my life, and I don’t tend toward the dramatic, which is how that sounds to me. But the truth was right there in my gut reaction, as it so often is, and I spent a few weeks with it.

What’s funny is how all of these drafts are pre-Covid. I’m not going out on a limb when I say that Covid has changed everything for all of us, am I? I remember in the first few weeks, when everything was shutting down and it felt weird but also temporary, back when we really didn’t know what we were facing or for how long, it seemed like all of the sanctimonious zen people on social media were posting about how beneficial this would be, how we’d all slow down and get back to basics and realize how we’d been living our lives wrong–a million other ‘gosh, look on the bright side’ ideas that made me roll my eyes and wonder how they were really feeling–and I could only react by thinking, but I just did that.

And I did. I spent most of 2019 thinking and reflecting and, of course, getting rid of stuff. That last one is nothing new for me, but these last few cleanouts have had a different purpose and tone than any previous ones. And 2019 handed me a series of life events to walk through, then figure out how to make sense out of, which I managed to do thanks to the single best self-improvement task I’ve ever undertaken, Charity Craig’s Manifest Abundance 60 Day Challenge (don’t worry, plenty more about those 60 days to come–just wanted to get the link here now). If you’d like to follow along for a bit, I plan to post pieces of the story over the next few weeks.

For now, just know that the last year or so of my life felt like it was handing me brick after brick, seemingly unrelated pieces with no clear purpose or plan.  And honestly, I was tired of the bricks. I was tired of the weight of them, and I was tired of wondering why they were suddenly mine and what I was supposed to do with them. And then I started Charity’s 60 day challenge, and it was as if someone had handed me a blueprint, mixed some mortar, and said, “Here. Now get to work.” And I did. I got to work building what turned out to be my cathedral.

As I said, more to come. For now, it’s nice to be back.