I was going to choose health as my theme for 2022. I’m a little overweight and my blood pressure is a little high. I’ve become largely sedentary again, and I eat and drink for comfort more than I do because I’m hungry. While I’m not having too much trouble sleeping, the quality of that sleep isn’t great and I am tired all the time.
I was having unusual hair loss on top of that fatigue, so I had my doctor run a complete blood panel, especially checking my thyroid. Every test came back normal. When I mentioned that moderate exercise was creating shortness of breath and tightness across my chest, she sent me to a cardiologist, who gave me a stress test. It, too, found nothing.
I’m an anxious person by nature, but I’ve been more anxious than usual. Sometimes I’ve been anxious enough to freeze up and be unable to act.
Work’s been crazy hard. Home’s been crazy hard. There’s nothing in my life right now that’s not crazy hard. It’s had a negative effect on my health. I need to pay attention to it. That’s why I thought health would be the right theme for 2022.
But it’s not. My health issues are symptoms, not causes. I need to get at the root.
I came into 2021 not great at saying the hard thing when I needed to. As I wrote in last year’s theme post, I’m a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy. I want to find the common ground. I believe deep in my spirit that when people are aligned, incredible things can happen.
But I seek that common ground to a fault. What I finally, finally learned in 2021 is that I was too often aligning to things that weren’t in line with my values and needs. It’s why I chose congruence as my 2021 theme: saying yes only when I truly could support that yes, and saying no otherwise.
Then 2021 proved to be very hard, especially at work. In collaborating with peer and superior leaders, I aligned to some things that turned out to be bad decisions. It took months for those decisions to prove themselves to be bad. Now we’re in a mess, and we’re trying to find our way out — and we do not agree on how to do that. It’s a strong test of living congruently, and I’m finding it to be wicked hard.
I think this is the wrong time for a new theme. In 2022, my 2021 theme needs to continue: congruence. I’m not done yet becoming comfortable being out of alignment with others when it’s right for me. Being confident in standing firmly for what I believe in and think is best — it feels to me like the most important thing by far for me to work on.
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