It’s Not Too Late To Make It A Good Year!

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We often structure everything so much that we forget life can’t be drawn on a drawing board or planned in advance. Unforeseen things happen. The most beautiful moments of happiness and also the greatest low blows lurk everywhere -professionally as well as privately.

Relationships start or break up. You find yourself anew or part ways forever. Unfortunately, illness, death, and grief are also omnipresent, even if our society often does not want to admit it and sweeps these issues under the carpet.

From afar we watch wars, close at home we hear about murder, killings, and shootings. Politics drives us crazy and neverending breaking news has broken many of us. And yet, there is so much more.

We passionately like to celebrate feasts of life, weddings, and births. We swear eternal love and fidelity to each other and enjoy the moment. Our own energy level and health are occasionally high and we are bubbling over with enthusiasm and ideas, other times we are depressed, feel sickly and weak, and don’t know what to do.

Everything comes and goes, arises and passes.

“Life is an adventure with a guaranteed fatal outcome.”

This is normal and absolutely fine. We should bring our idea and expectation of the perfect life and neverending happiness to a realistic level and perceive what is –including all the facets that belong to real life. Only in this way can we truly reflect and consciously decide how to deal with the different phases of life.

So many of us are in a crisis and we have the feeling that our own life -and all the ideas we have about it- are like shambles in front of us.

Thoughts and feelings change, plans are discarded from one day to the next, new challenges are waiting to be accepted, and the status quo is questioned.

Then you feel like you’ve landed at a dead end and don’t know what to do. Then it’s time to get up, knock off the dirt, take a breath, and start again.

And as corny as it may sound, yes, even when you hold all the broken pieces of your own plans, feelings, and ideas in your hands, there are glimmers of hope, new possibilities, and opportunities to look at all this from a different perspective and to draw something from it and learn.

Works for me.

That’s what I thought for the last few years. I was and I am a fortunate woman. I have the gift of showing optimism and I can think in a solution-oriented way, and sometimes I can even inspire people. A lot of things that went well were self-evident to me. Strokes of fate and crises of meaning were unfamiliar to me at first, but I was able to learn.

The simple truth? Nothing in this world and nothing in this life is safe and forever. This is incredibly painful, but also important and ultimately a good thing! If happiness isn’t forever, neither is pain and suffering.

The river of life grabbed me with all its force this year. It showed me wild adventures, plunged me into dangerous depths, and then carried me peacefully through the most beautiful landscapes. I could have drowned, but I decided to learn to surf on the spur of the moment -even when the water was unbearably cold!

“I’m more vulnerable than I thought, but stronger than I ever dreamed.”

Crises can show you a lot. You get to know yourself and get a completely new perspective, provided you allow it and are willing to learn from it. That’s what I wanted. But how?

I took advantage of this phase, in which everything I thought was right, important, and constant was questioned. It forced me to take a complete inventory. A time-out – just for me. Be alone. All in, only with me, my thoughts, feelings, fears, needs, ideas, and desires.

To take inventory of one’s own life. When do you ever have the chance to do so? But you have to use it, even if it takes a lot of courage and strength! Reflection and dealing purely with oneself is really exhausting but definitely, the most valuable thing you can do for yourself.

“Illegal u-turn” the route was recalculated! And so I went on a road trip to myself. Rethink goals, reset, decide spontaneously, and act intuitively. Wow, that’s intense!

This year I grew immensely. First and foremost, beyond me. And that’s a great feeling.

In the end, only you remain.

“Times are tough but you are tougher!

That’s what a good friend said to me. Actually, that’s exactly what you don’t want to hear in such a phase, namely that time heals all wounds. I can’t say whether that’s the case but I know that the relationship to the depths of life, to the oppressive feelings and fears change with time.

Distance -time and space- allows many things to appear in a new light. It’s a gradual process and you don’t believe it at all on the first day you get the rug pulled out from under your feet.

But it’s true. Suddenly, it’s easier to breathe, you wake up in the morning and have the glimmer of an idea of how things might go on, and you start to notice the little beautiful things again that you haven’t even seen before, when it felt like you lived in a deep black hole.

And one magic word is, among other things…SELF-CARE.

Acknowledging yourself as the most valuable thing you have, and learning to treasure yourself is an essential step towards more trust in life. Doing something good for yourself every day in small portions, caressing your soul, and building yourself up, is so immensely important for your own recovery.

Ultimately, this was and is the most important insight for me this year:

I am my base.

It’s nice and wonderful when everything runs smoothly on the outside. I have a fulfilling job, a loving husband, good friends, and a cozy home. But if I’m not with myself, it doesn’t do me any good in the end and I only perceive life through a veil.

When I know myself, when I know that I am with myself and can rely on myself, then little or hardly anything can really shake me up. I had to learn it the hard way and in retrospect, I’m very grateful for it.

Do you need unhappiness to feel happiness? I asked myself that sometimes.
After this year, I can say with all my heart: Yes and no.

I didn’t necessarily need all these experiences, they were really turbulent and exhausting but without them, I wouldn’t have gotten some insights that I wouldn’t want to miss today.

We should let ourselves be touched more often.

Like my blogging friend Lisa recently posted, when a door closes, another one opens somewhere. But we do have to see them first, recognize the gap through which the light flows, dare to tap lightly against them, open them a little further, and then even walk through them.

Of course, it was the same this year. New opportunities lurked everywhere, great projects, inquiries, orders, exciting minds with new ideas. I am infinitely grateful for all the opportunities and also for my courage to keep trying new things and catapult myself out of my comfort zone. Oh, I am good at that.

Fuck your master plan!

This is exactly what has helped me to see many things more calmly, not to tense up, not to overthink my life, and to refrain from all the plans because things turn out differently anyway.

So you can confidently say: Fuck your master plan!

Because even if everything is right and well thought out in theory, it can be turned upside down from one day to the next. A hard test of happiness.

Guess what? Life does what it wants anyway and that’s a good thing.

Sometimes everything seems to lie in front of you in fractions, like mosaic tiles that you once laid out but now you can’t remember and then you rearrange it all. Newly assembled, individual patterns emerge and soon it’s a work of art on its own. Different than before, that’s for sure but nevertheless as beautiful –if not more beautiful, precisely because I took it into my own hands and redesigned it.

And then life comes along and shakes the stones around again. Different again, new again, beautiful. I watch and am amazed. But first and foremost, I’m looking forward to everything coming because I know I have the trust and confidence that it will be beautiful and colorful. In any case, it remains exciting.

Thank you life, you keep me entertained and busy!

So was this year a good year? Yes!

And if it wasn’t? Then there is still time to make it a good year. In the end is up to us. It always is.