By Damián Goldvarg
February is the month of love and friendship. It is a good time to reflect on our relationships. How did COVID-19 impact them? If you had to evaluate the level of satisfaction you have in your relationships with yourself, your partner, friends, family members, neighbors, and with the world around you. Do you think there may be any differences between how they were working pre- and post-pandemic?The first relationship to examine is with ourselves. If we don’t have a loving inner dialogue, if we’re judging ourselves negatively, if we’re not good company for ourselves, we’re not going to be good company for others. The relationship with ourselves and how our internal dialogue works are key to all other relationships. A place to start is working on achieving inner peace to allow for better relationships with others.
Friendships and family relations need to be cultivated. That is to say, for them to work and be satisfactory, you need to dedicate attention, time, and care. When we stop doing this, we can distance ourselves. In some cases, those distances widen over time but not always. COVID isolated us physically and sometimes emotionally as well. By limiting physical contact, COVID-19 distanced us from people and friends with whom we may not resume ties.
Valentine’s Day is a day to evaluate whether we need to strengthen any of our relationships. Are there people we would like to contact and recover some of those links that we have neglected? We need to let these people we love know how important they are in our lives.
It is not only time to reflect on our relationships with ourselves and our loved ones. It is also a good time to reflect on our relationship with the world around us. How are we cultivating our relationship with the world? How do we get involved to make the world a better place? What activities are we doing to facilitate awareness around us about climate change, institutionalized racism, global violence, post Covid consequences?
I want to invite you this month to reflect on your relationship with the world and evaluate if there are steps you would like to take to strengthen relationships with yourself, your loved ones, and the world around you.
