They say that hindsight is 2020. They also say that what we do not learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat. And as a yoga teacher I love recently said, “We need to wrap things up in order to unwrap their meaning.”

Here we are at the threshold of a New Year. One deeply imprinted by an arduous and demanding past year. How we navigate transitions is always important. But perhaps this year that truism is more relevant than ever? If that’s so, it bears spending some time “wrapping up” what has been, so that we can step forward wisely shaped by what we discover. Not an easy thing to do. Especially as we still find ourselves inside of the ripple effects of something so wide sweeping in its impact.

And yet, step forward we must.

Transitions can be many things. They can be smooth. And they can be perilous. They can be welcome or not. Known or unknown. Isolating or community building. Within our control and beyond our control. How then can we influence how it will go?

By remembering that Life comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and not by our design alone.

One of the things I have come to deeply appreciate and acknowledge in my own life are the ways in which the very worst of my life has built me into the woman I am today. Experiences that viewed now through the perspective of time, maturation, and a steady choice to accept more and more of what Life brings, has brought me to not just accept what I did not want, what I felt hurt me, what I felt should never have happened to me, but to the very powerful recognition of the absolute necessity of it All.

It has been nothing short of Grace to learn how to include it all. Taking me from a refusal, to a begrudging acceptance, to forgiveness, to a place where there is nothing to forgive. Because it was all, always, exactly as it was meant to be. That being, that “All things are equal under creation.” While it might seem utter madness to say that anything that happens is equal to anything else, it is for sure the way out of suffering. Of fighting. Of blaming. Of trying to control Life to show up on your terms.

With that said, if it were years from now, and you were in a place where you no longer felt overwhelmed, afraid, frustrated or anxious by what has been happening this past year, what would you know to be true? What learnings about yourself and how the world works have occurred that only could have happened through an experience this big? And this unwelcome.

And if it were true…If the painful was the same as the pleasurable. The difficult the same as the easy. The unwanted the same as the wanted. What gift could you unwrap for yourself by wrapping up any of the ways that you have refused what this past year has brought? What might you have received that you could not have gotten otherwise?

And what would it require of you to take that knowing into this next year?