2020, a year of challenge, hardship, and struggle for all. A year of unexpected loss, the mourning of our loved ones and life achieving events. But beneath all the turmoil may lie a stronger version of yourself, the person we may never have met before this year. Below are the lessons that 2020 has taught me.

How To Truly Connect:

Maybe 2020 is teaching us how to truly connect; how to truly connect with ourselves and how we feel. To connect with the things that make our hearts burst in the midst of the burdening pain and fear. This year is teaching us that connection is so much more than physicality, genuine connection exists within caring for, and hoping for, and diving into those we love. We can touch people without touching them, that we can be distanced from them and yet, closer than ever before. This year is reminding us that we need to take care of one another, that we have a responsibility for one another, that we should tell those in our lives that we care for them, that we are grateful for them.

Maybe 2020 is helping us to take less for granted by appreciating the endless bounty of nature and the beauty of the presence of people in our lives. How to be a good friend, a caring sibling, how to care for beyond the materialism of life, what it means to show up when times are difficult. This year is teaching us how to pay attention to the relationships in our lives, to really connect with the people in our lives who saved us when we didn't know we were falling. This year is helping us to take inventory of the space we hold in our lives for the things we don't deserve, value, or honor. It is teaching us how we can and should defend our hearts, our energy, our hope. This year is teaching us how to let go, in more ways than the obvious where we only connect with what ignites us.

How Strong We Are:

Maybe 2020 is showing us that we can make it through the moments in our lives that felt uncertain and heavily haunting. This year is showing us that everything can be taken away, that our "guaranteed" comfort, plans, safety can be clawed and dismantled by the world around us but no force in this world can take away our hope, our willingness to fight to make it tomorrow. This year is showing us that we are always stronger than we think, that we can endure what has not been experienced, that losses can become lessons and all the space in our life is an opportunity to plant seeds that grow from cracks of broken concrete, turning uncertainty to certainty.

This year proved to us that we can survive and withstand anything, that we are never as alone as we think, and that we need one another; not only in the face of adversity but in our empty spaces and broken hearts.

That there is beauty in the falling of everything. No matter how dark it gets - we will always survive the chaos. And not because it doesn't manage to swallow us or because we are unaffected but because we shift by re-evaluation and self-reflection where our perspectives and values change. This year is demonstrating to us that chaos will always remain, that we cannot control life, but we can control how we react. We can control how we learn from the withstanding, how we show up for those we care for, how we adapt to the struggles of everyday, and how we give ourselves permission to learn and grow. We can control how we soften in the time of hardship, and use that as our most indestructible form of strength.

How To Dig For A Deeper Version Of Happiness Inside Yourself:

Maybe 2020 is compelling us to find a new version of joy, peace, and safety that we didn't notice existed a few months ago. Right now, happiness may be our morning cup of hot chocolate; sitting and drinking as the sun rises and the world wakes up around you. Happiness is seeing the way the light plays with trees in nature, how the sky looks at your favorite time of the night star performance, the way the Moon fills the air with a nostalgic energy from childhood. Happiness may just be hearing your mother's voice or seeing your friend's face flutter across your screen; reminding you of their name, your jokes, their stories, and their beauty splashing across your phone.

Happiness is the most simple yet presented in the most profound ways. Existing in the songs that you replay and discover accidentally, the food you eat, and the way your pen scratches across your journal in the morning. Happiness is a warm bath and the utter silence that accompanies where you fully connect with yourself. This is what has been saving us all along, the smallness of our happiness that exists everyday in the most discrete, nameless moments.