Five months later…how positivity is STILL my lifestyle of choice.
Yeah, it’s been a rough five months. No one can debate that. Everything we knew about life pre-covid has changed immensely. Much about life today was unforeseen five months ago when I wrote my last Medium post offering tips on staying positive. As the founder of a luxury travel company who had just refunded tons of future bookings and lost tons of future income, it wasn’t exactly easy to stay upbeat during those weeks. Back at the end of March, we thought it might just be a few weeks…maybe a month or two…before we snapped back to our pre-covid lives.
Ha. Joke’s on all of us.
Here we are, five full months later with no end to the pandemic in sight. Many of my travel clients have told me they won’t book an international trip until a vaccine is safe and readily available. Others have been totally focused on home-schooling their kids, and haven’t put travel back on their “to do” list. Understandable. It’s uncharted skies and all new times, none of which any of us were prepared for. In short, so much of what we all expected to do/see/eat/play/visit in 2020 has been cancelled. I was really looking forward to seeing Michael Franti live in concert at Red Rocks in June, visiting Bali again, and seeing friends who had planned to visit me on Maui. None of this happening, maybe in 2021?
I’ve had my own ups and downs with all of this the past 5 months. So much has changed. But, there are still some really BIG positives emerging from this pandemic that has altered life as we all knew it. I didn’t know it at the time, as it was freaking SCARY, but a near-fatal car crash on April 21 left me with the inability to allow anything but gratitude to be my top emotion day after day. I drive by the scene of that accident daily, and I look up & say “THANK YOU.”
Dear God, I got the memo. Thank you for not allowing that day to be my last. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to make some major changes in my own life, and hopefully inspire others to do the same.
Changes have never scared me. But I have lived in fear of “not enough” before. I have built businesses from scratch, and found ways to let faith overrule my fear. Time to do it again. Within a week of that car accident, I decided to downsize the $18million travel business I had built in favor of reverting to my own independent affiliation with my original host agency. This set the stage for me to still book elite travel for my favorite clients in the future when it’s safe, with a tried-and-true platform that removed the stress of me overseeing 28 others at the most stressful time the travel industry has ever known. So there’s that. (Check out the new version of my revamped Elite Travel offerings at www.stacymaui.com/elitetravel).
Days later, chef friends and others who sampled the signature gluten-free, grainfree vegan chocolate chip coconut sea salt cookies I had started baking as a therapeutic hobby, started asking when I’d sell them. Huh? I don’t sell cookies, I sell travel….well, that’s the old story!
Fast forward a few months and I’ve since had a photo shoot in my kitchen and at the beach with my pups for my newly revamped and redesigned websites and businesses. I’ve been doing reiki quietly on friends the past few years since becoming a reiki master. That, and my other healing/intuitive gifts are now available to book here: www.stacymaui.com/healing. And yep, the cookies have taken on a life of their own! I am even now doing “pop up shops” at the local farmers’ market. Never saw that coming!
Check out www.stacymauicookies.com to read that part of my story. I distracted myself from the world mess with things like getting my food safety certification and a commercial kitchen to bake in. We launched mainland shipping a few weeks ago in partnership with UPS and my talented web designer is now doubling as the online store manager and keeping us on track for explosive online growth. These cookies are the best in class, as I know as a celiac who’s tried them all! Made on Maui, each batch handmade by me, infused with aloha and reiki.
In between baking cookies, I’ve kept myself grounded mostly by playing with my three rescue dogs constantly. Going on lots of walks. Saying gratitude prayers for surviving that Jeep crash. Doing yoga. Lighting candles. Supporting local businesses whenever possible (ie, who doesn’t love having award-winning chefs deliver deliciousness in the name of Maui feeding Maui?!?).
It’s been a really wild past five months. The days I want to cry, I cry. Then I hug a dog or two or three and it feels less awful. I bake up a batch of cookies and enjoy how delicious they smell and taste. I reach out regularly by phone to my inner circle of soul family/friends. I try to stay off Zoom unless it’s essential as that gives me a headache at this point. I don’t spend time with people who drain my energy, that doesn’t help any of us.
Being positive does not mean every day is easy, it just means that there is always something positive to find in every day. For me, it’s knowing that I (and my dogs) survived that car accident and I was given the chance to embrace all that is happening and make major changes in my own life. That’s something I remind myself of daily. And it helps me to keep going, even on the days I wake up and think WTF is happening here???? Because yes, we ALL have those days. It’s a pandemic, and this too, shall pass.
