Five ideas that made my year.

2022 was a mixed year for me. There were several highlights but also some personal challenges. As I look back, here are some quotes that highlight things I thought about this year.

1. “Positivity is not about saying “The house is burning down, but at least it’s keeping my hands warm.” It’s about finding the value, the meaning, the big picture significance in life’s ups and downs. This quote from Zach Carlsen’s blog really spoke to me. Positivity is one of my top 10 Gallup strengths, and I tried to practice it this year by noticing how paying attention to what’s working lifted both me and others. I also nurtured positive moments by celebrating holidays, giving fun gifts instead of practical ones, and using positive moments to shift gears when times were heavy.
2. “When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.“ This comes from Oliver Burkeman’s last column for The Guardian in which he quotes Jungian therapist James Hollis‘ insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” Many of us are not very good judges of what will make us happy.
3.  “Neurosis: A Suffering That Has Not Yet Found Its Meaning.“ I think we often berate ourselves for the fact that we keep thinking about the same things or looping over the same issues. As sensitives, it’s easy to think of ourselves as neurotic because we can’t just “let things go,” especially things that were traumatic or that sunk deep for us. This felt like a very self-compassionate way to think about areas that are charged with feelings. I came across it in James Hollis’ book The Broken Mirror in which he quotes Carl Jung. The full quote goes like this: “Jung noted that what we call “neurosis,” a deep inner split between our instincts and our acclimated acculturations, is a suffering that has not yet found its meaning.”
4. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” Sometimes, it’s easy to feel that things are sliding backwards in different ways all around the world. I found this Steinbeck quote strangely helpful as a lens to look at what’s happening around us. We do take many steps forward as societies and we have made lots of progress. But we can’t assume that this progress will not receive pushback or will never encounter forces that want to undermine it. Steinbeck tells us that “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”
5. “Forgiveness is not an emotion, and it can’t take the place of one. It’s a decision made by your whole self after your true emotional work has been done.” This quote by the wise and wonderful Karla McLaren talks about something essential. Often, we are almost pressured to forgive others before we have truly felt our anger, before we have thought about the ways in which we want to shift our boundaries to better protect ourselves the next time, and even before we have truly felt the grief and hurt that can come after being betrayed and manipulated. It is only when we have moved through all these emotions does forgiveness become possible. And it’s only when we listen to the wisdom of these emotions do we come to a place where we can make the decision to forgive. We don’t conjure up feelings of forgiveness out of thin air. We actively move through our emotions and then make the DECISION to forgive from our whole self.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.” SIGN UP HERE for Ritu’s newsletter The Highly Sensitive Creative or Get the book HERE.