Imagine this...
It's New Year's Eve, 2021. You wake up that morning with a slight cough, feeling run down, but figure it's probably due to the business of the holiday season. You head out to work for the morning. You're exhausted. You come home only to take your temperature, and as you glance down at the thermometer it shows that dreaded number, 101.5. A fever. How lucky. With all the chaos around COVID, you decide that it would be good for you to get tested. The afternoon comes around, you have New Year's Eve plans with friends who you finally are reconnecting with! You're excited! Only for your test to come back positive.
This is how the start of 2022 went for me. However, I do acknowledge that I am not unlike many others, as a lot of people are plagued with COVID right now, and I am lucky to be able to laugh about the timing of it all, it still sucks. Funny enough, while being sick threw a curveball at me/my plans, it wasn't the worst possible thing that could've happened...
Since this past October, I have been running around like a chicken with its head cut off, purposefully? No. Gracefully? Not that either, but alive nonetheless. Yes, there was a short week where I did have the flu (lucky, I know), but other than that, it's been a nonstop production. The holiday season did nothing to slow the chaos down either. Instead, my free time was now spent trying to catch up with old friends, and preparing for Christmas, family parties, etc., rather than slowing down to recenter myself. Honestly, having COVID these past few days has been the most rest I've gotten in... months.
Don't get me wrong, I was disappointed at the inability to spend NYE with some of my friends, as any college student would be, and it even sucks to not be able to *get a jump right onto my goals for 2022,* but this restful period has been able to help me slow down, and reset myself for the weeks to come.
This gift of rest and of silence in our lives on a regular basis is something society has lost its grip on. The notion of productivity/major accomplishments is pushed so heavily onto all of us, that in order to unplug from our phones and take a day off, we have to be sick to do so. While COVID taught us all a thing or two about cleanliness and personal hygiene, as we begin 2022 let us not forget the positive things we can learn as well.
So don't be afraid to take a day here and there to fully relax, and find stillness in your heart and mind. Read a book, watch a movie! Go to the mall, get a pedicure, take a long nap. Whatever it means for you to recenter yourself, take some time every once in a while to take care of YOU.
Happy New Year, and here's to a great 2022.
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