525,600 minutes: How do you measure a year like 2020?

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.

The number of minutes in a year. Every year. Even the year of 2020, which seems like the longest pregnancy ever (I get to say that because I am, in fact, pregnant).

​​I recently watched a Broadway special and this song was one of the highlights. It started a stream of reflections on the inception of Integrative Family Medicine, to our launch, to closing out our first business year of 2020.

How do you measure, measure a year, a year in the life?

In daylights,

In sunsets,

In midnights,

In cups of coffee,

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife

Check (all the above).

Starting a healthcare business amid a pandemic is a bucket list item I never knew I had. This year has been measured with countless highs, some lows, laughter, and strife. You see, Sarah and I started this business from strife in a previous working relationship at a corporate employer. I knew that the year of 2020 had to have something better waiting in it, because in the last week of my corporate employment, I’d left a massive hole in my bedroom wall from throwing a shoe out of anger. Anger that wasn’t leading me anywhere professionally or personally. An anger that needed to be turned into love.

How do you measure a year in a life? How about love?

When I reached out to Sarah to connect this past spring, she accepted me with love. Spring was a sort of new beginning in my life. I was now staying home with a 7-month-old baby, a new puppy, an old lazy dog, a cranky cat, and my husband who was put on remote working orders with the military. The things you dream of when you’re working 70 hours a week but on the opposite spectrum, these same things smack you with a dose of reality when you’re finally removed from the chaos.

It seemed like the perfect time to dream up a life of opportunities for me, my family, and for the community I live in.

How do you measure a life of a woman or a man? In truths that she learned, or in times that she cried?

So how do you measure a year like 2020? Do you find yourself comparing yourself to what others are doing and things that you are not? Are you measuring a year of your life from the perspective of social media? I was. I probably still am. This is where the opportunity to measure the year against your own growth takes hold.

I learned too much about myself in 2020. More than I asked for. Can I make a few returns in this department? I wasn’t ready to measure myself or who I was as a woman, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, co-worker…

I learned so many truths, albeit through laughter and tears:

• I learned that if I don’t take care of myself physically, mentally, and spiritually, I don’t take good care of my family. I can measure the year by working on my health and healing process through meditation, writing, the work of a nutritionist friend, and eliminating toxic things from my life, like people, food, social media feeds, and bad tv.
  
  
• I learned from my self-care that I have more to offer in this life than I was allowing myself to contribute in a crappy corporate healthcare job that compromised my morals and ethics on a daily basis. I can measure the year by repairing my relationship with Sarah and the launch of Integrative Family Medicine eight months after our initial discussion. (See? Shorter than a real pregnancy).
  
  
• I learned that this community needs healthcare options through my own healthcare issues post-pregnancy. I can measure the year in unpaid medical claims by my insurance and the grace and kindness of my own medical providers.

We also learned that the community of IFM has been waiting for a place like us: a place that was built on our own personal experiences, dreams, and need for an inclusive medical community that focuses on people, health, and healing. We can measure a year by the outstanding response our community has shown us and building a business brand on consciousness, compassion, community, and culture.

Let's celebrate and remember a year in a life.

Remembering a year like 2020 isn’t going to be hard to do. It will be a year we always remember and an era of time that we had to square up with our fears, face the realities our world was enduring, and delicately navigate polarizing beliefs that have come to an all-time high. (Insert your own reflection on a year in your life here).

I still choose to believe in the goodness of a year like 2020. I choose to believe in the goodness of humans and our purpose that we live out each and every day. 

Measure your life in love. You know that it’s a gift from above.
I celebrate 2020 and all it has offered me: a better friendship with Sarah, a new business we can call our own, and a family that chooses to love me for all that I am (which lately is hungry, tired, and very…very pregnant).  I hope that as you close out 2020 and look to 2021, you continue to measure your blessings and life in love.

Love,

Kara
 

PS- if you aren’t singing it by now, did you even do the 90’s right?!

Link: https://youtu.be/9A_2WFx8FEU