Do you find yourself, or have you ever found yourself, feeling incredibly disconnected and out of control with what’s going on around you that you think, “What am I even doing here?”

2020 has been many things, but forgiving isn’t one of them. With every new month/week/day/hour, something happens to shake up our sense of humanity and replace it with a portion of hopelessness. Where there’s no actual way to catch our breaths, even once we take off our Covid-19 safety masks. The masks have reminded us how little attention we paid to our actual breathing before, they’ve tightened our anxiety and stress, and at times, make it somehow harder to see and hear what’s happening in the world around us.

Our masks trigger the “fright, flight, or fight” reflex in our brain because of our lack in ability to breathe properly. Most people have gotten so used to just talking the world and reality away that, we’ve felt like the masks were a strain on our humanity…our “freedom”. It was losing our sense of speaking without having to think about how to fully breathe that caused us all to go mad as a collective.

Without the ability to explain our lack of understanding of reality away, we were forced to be fully aware of it and stand and recognize our place in it.

Now that 2020 is coming to a painfully slow and yet still daunting end, we find ourselves reflecting on the deeper truths of where we live in the world. We’re not in control here.

Within the first few months of the mandatory lockdown people were being so kind and generous and it was a good thing, but it didn’t last. Soon there were hints and stories of sexual assaults on women nationwide, of rural racism at supermarkets and in public, police brutality came into the spotlight on a massive scale, and white America had the spotlight of ignorance it so generously cast on minorities flipped back at itself.

And here some dared to ask, “What did we ever truly control?”

Native American nations across the U.S. are still impoverished and disrespected. Immigrants are only welcome to be what America says they are and nothing more, a woman’s body still isn’t her’s to manage or protect, and power is far more important than truth. Homelessness is on the rise nationwide, money that was meant for the poorest people was taken by the people closest to the top to prove a point, and the education system may never fully recover. Truthfully, I hope it does. No, I hope we can reshape it to actually be about education and not a for profit scheme like so much other institutions of America.

What did we control? Nothing.

Freedom isn’t about control, it’s about awareness. And although 2020 hasn’t been at all forgiving , it has shown us exactly how unaware of ourselves and our humanity we’ve been for decades.

There-in-lies the silver lining. Being unaware of our awareness has evolved, globally really, into becoming aware of our unawareness. Where truth and freedom have been waiting for us to discover them.

It’s not our job to be in control of the world as human beings, it’s our job to continuously strive to be aware of our place in it. To grow in awareness as a whole, around the world.

Control is always only temporary. Awareness, is life.