Attorney Wellness
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Pages | 0054 |
| Citation | Vol. 26 No. 3 Pg. 0054 |
The Power of a Year in Review
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."-Friedrich Nietszche
BY TARA SIMKINS
If you are reading this article, then the year 2020, and all that it unleashed-a global pandemic, extreme social unrest and inequality, economic challenges and a contentious presidential election to boot-did not kill you; however, if you are like me, it might have knocked the wind out of your sails a bit. Welcome to being a normal human being in the modern world.
The question a year like 2020 presents for us is whether we want to use our experience to indeed make us stronger, and, if so, how?
Do you want to use your 2020 experience to make you stronger?
Science is now proving the famous Nietszche adage to be true.[1] When I reflect upon the most difficult moments in my life, I find that the simple decision to use those difficulties to create not only a path forward, but the possibility of a stronger me than before, has been the most life-giving and life-changing decision that I have ever made.[2]
The end of 2010 presented such an opportunity for me. At that point in my legal
career, I was a partner at Hull Barrett, P.C., in Augusta. My middle son, Brennan, had been diagnosed with leukemia in January 2009. In the previous 22 months, Brennan had undergone inductive therapy for acute myeloid leukemia in Augusta, an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant in Atlanta, two more unsuccessful bone marrow transplants in Memphis and was now in need of a fourth bone marrow transplant.
In November 2010, I believed that I was most likely going to have a family of four come the next spring—me; my husband, Turner; and my two other sons, 10-year-old Nat and seven-year-old Christopher. I hoped against hope that I would have a family of five, that Brennan would survive an unprecedented fourth transplant in an 18-month time period, but the odds of that were about the same as Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. I knew I was not strong enough—yet—to make this happen. I decided in that moment, however, that I was willing to develop the necessary strength to create the possibility of a future that could hold the same or greater opportunity for happiness and success as it did before we found ourselves in the world of childhood cancer.
We all face a similar decision today. How do we use our 2020 experience to make us stronger and create a future filled with possibilities equal to or greater than our perceived pre-2020...
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