
What if hindsight is the year 2020?!? What if everything that we have expected, longed for, and aspired to be begins this year? What exactly is 2020 vision….besides being my tag line since January 1?? According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s website, 2020 vision means normal vision. Imagine that…normal. What if we had striven so hard prior to this year to see clearer, and be the laser focused, neurotically work-driven, fast paced super humans that we had become…that somehow our “normal vision” had become far too intense to actually SEE what was right in front of us the whole entire time?
Maybe our generation needed over a century to recover, rise, and fall again due to another global pandemic. A wise older brother of mine once said that every generation typically falls due to outsmarting themselves. What if we have done just that? Whether you are a firm believer in God cleansing the Earth, global warfare conspiracy theories, some sort of alien-like, cosmic overtaking of the 5G network, or Communistic underground game planning…..we are called to PAUSE. Besides the grave economic state and the unfortuate loss of .006% of the worldly population (God rest their souls)…the other 99.994% of us are called to make sense of all of this. It is no wonder that every action is being monitored, every media source is on high alert, and we are left with uncertainty and concern for humankind. We are called to PAUSE.
What does your pause look like? Does it look like a neighborhood full of children’s laughter, neighbors walking nightly, phoning your loved ones, reaching out to old friends, working on that project that’s been put aside for 7 years? For me it has meant embracing the time we have here on Earth…the time we have been so blindly taking advantage of for so long. It means enjoying the extra hour of sleep, the extra hour of playtime with my kids, the extra months of them at home with me (albeit hell some days), watching the birds flutter from tree to fence, feeling the sun-kissed air on tired skin while staring at bright green leaves against a cool blue skyline…it means breathing again. I have been holding my breath and closing my eyes for so long. We are called to SEE.
We are not born with clear vision….it happens over time! “In fact, it takes more than six months of meticulous development in utero before your little one’s eyes are ready to process visual information from the outside world.” from http://www.whattoexpect.com. And even after we are born it takes some time for our eyesight to develop into what it eventually becomes. So what if this year is a culmination of years and years of development, years of learning curves, years of hard-and-fast lessons meant to be turned upside down…all for the sake of saving ourselves? Saving ourselves for the moments that count…cherishing every last bite, expressing thanks for every single day, and loving each moment with enough clarity to see that normal is enough. Normal is the brilliance we have been seeking all along…and it is ours. 2020 is the year we are called to regain our appreciation for life. We are called to LIVE.