As a runner, whenever you step up in distance or pace it takes a while to adjust. It’s hard work. Once your fitness improves, you physically and mentally move into this new comfort zone of higher performance.
As a first time parent, your first baby changes your life so considerably that you wonder how people ever have more than one. Then things get easier, you become accustomed to your new life and you become comfortable. Then you go back to work, or have another child, and life becomes more challenging once again.
There are certain elements of life that are able to be moderated so that any life changes can be incremental. Then there are aspects of life that are outside of your control. Much that has happened in 2020 fits into this box.
When we think of our idols, of the strongest people we know, their strength may come from their character or it may come from their life experiences. Having a tough and challenging life may ultimately lead to strength, but it is equally likely to make you feel weak and out of control as you endure the waves of hardship. These strong people you think of, are not always strong, do not always have their shit together, but their journey has provided them with adversity and the opportunity to gain strength and resilience. This only happens if the difficulty is within moderation of what that person can endure. Everyone has a breaking point, everyone.
The trick with strength is to reread my first two paragraphs. You see, you never have to be strong all of the time. You only need to be strong enough to get through this next bit. To get to the point where your baby sleeps through, to get to the point when you can run 5k in a given time, to get to the point of grief following the death of a loved one that allows you to function, to get to wherever from that point of difficulty that things get easier.
Christalla Jamil has this pinned to her Twitter feed:
This totally resonates with me. 2020 has been an extremely challenging year for everyone. We have all had our wobbles because so much of what is happening around us is outside of our control. Take a moment to think where we now are. On the verge of another lockdown?? Think back to where we were in March and how fearful that prospect was and how much strength and resilience we have gained. School leaders all over the country have been hit with wave after wave of change. It is no wonder that we are so mentally and physically exhausted. Part of this tiredness comes from not knowing when it will end, when normal life will resume, and this makes my ‘only needing to be strong for short periods of time as we adjust’ a bit of a fallacy. Or at least as it may appear.
I don’t have a solution for this, but my advice is perhaps just take small steps, gain strength from the collective networks you have so that you know that you are not alone on this journey, and take a moment every so often to look back and see how far you have come. Let’s hope that as we move into 2021, life will become easier and we will all have grown in strength as part of the journey.
Mrs M’s Teacher Talk 