A cornerstone of my practise as a counsellor and in my personal life has been a focus on mindfulness.. being conscious and intentional about each moment or task in front of you. Over the past 18 months I have been as caught in the angst of the world as many other people, and lived in fear of what we have lost and what might be to come.

As time has gone on many things are much worse than I had ever thought they would be, but not in the ways I thought they would be. I have grieved the loss of relationships that were not what I thought they were, but I haven't had to grieve the death of anyone I love. I have had a (mostly) contained fury about the loss of livelihoods, segregation, coercion and desperation of so many people around me.

I have talked about the fact that it is my disillusionment with who people are at their core, with backs to the wall.. wallowing in the belief that when people attack out of fear that this is their truest character and I expected something different.

I have processed those relationships in ways I am always counselling my clients not to.. framing all of the past by the actions of the present and deciding that because someone is hostile now, they may always have been that way and I just didn't see it.

Today I took time to see what is in front of me once again. There are people I feel disappointed by and who have been great friends and supporters at different times over the last two decades. One thing doesn't discount the other. I can be thankful for the good.

In my preoccupation with what I thought was lost, I was not seeing what it is still in front of me. I have a whole new circle of people around me.. some new, some continued, and we have a wonderful common goal of ensuring freedoms for all of our countrymen into the future. People who share common goals of non-discrimination, autonomy, no coercion, and who want to fight for such things for everyone, even those with whom they disagree. This is an amazing thing to see and to be part of.

Yes there are things that are going really really badly right now and they may get worse. Yes, I am disappointed in some relationships.

And

Yes there are some amazing new, and probaby somewhat unlikely friendships blossoming that may be for a short time or for a long time, but I don't need to worry about that. I just need to know that with this community, in this moment, we are changing the world in some way just doing the one thing in front of us at each and every moment.

At any given point in time, that is all we have and all that we can do.