The month of December has arrived right on time to tell us that we have reached the official end of 2021! Our second year in a worldwide pandemic, 2021 brought along a much different mindset than 2020. We learned more about our adaptability as a society, solidified by the COVID vaccine and the relaxed protocols consequently following it. Some of us still work from home, a lot of us are living a hybrid lifestyle, and some of us (the best of us) are still as essential as they were during the beginning of the pandemic. While we might have reached an eventual acceptance of our circumstances in this aspect, I notice that we have seemed to become less accepting in other areas of our lives.

More and more everyday, I see dramatics pervade the media. A certain image lodges itself in the back of our minds of what life “should be.” A life with shortcuts. A life full of hacks and answers. A life that only preserves the good and omits the bad and the ugly. But I consider this a very watered-down version of life. 

There will always be days when it’s not going to be about you or me, where we have to momentarily place our “main character” energy on a shelf. Sometimes we make that sound too sacrificial. Coexisting can prove difficult because of expectations that quickly evolve into fantasies. We didn’t get here all on our own; social media works tirelessly at cataloguing and categorizing good versus bad, toxic, problematic. We want to “skip to the good part,” which makes us forget that with little risk, there is very little reward.

You might have heard of a little American classic called Little Women. Since April, I’ve been trying to finish reading this novel. The language was much denser than I thought it would be, and Louisa May Alcott can come off preachy, throwing in a moral every other paragraph. But there’s no doubt that Little Women did an excellent job of teaching about the trial and error of life – all of the small and big moments that work simultaneously to shape our characters into something greater. We can sit around and whine, maybe try to close ourselves off to the world. Or we can accept we’re on this ride and make the decisions we can with what we’re given at the moment. Life’s messy like that … but it’s also very rewarding in ways unthinkable to us even at the present moment.

Take a look back at yourself a year ago. Have things changed for the better? If not, take your time now to make your mistakes. Go through your trial and error. Progress isn’t linear, and as long as you’re fully focused on your present, you’ll be able to look back in time and see the seeds you once planted finally come to bloom. I promise you’re not running out of time.

All of us at Nonahood News want to wish the Lake Nona community a happy holiday season! Be sure to catch us in 2022.