When catching up with friends and family, of late, I’ve found myself asking how they’re doing in plague-adjusted terms, rather than in an absolute sense.

I think this is only fair because, for many of us, this has not been a spectacular year—for many reasons—and the wild, disruptive variables associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have been at the core of many wellness-barometer adjustments downward.

I also think this is a healthy way of perceiving things because although I have certain default expectations of myself, based on past experience and on some amount of optimism about what I might accomplish in the future, it seems prudent to recalibrate the metrics we use when making such judgements based on the circumstances influencing our performance.

In other words: I probably would have lived a very different life if 2020 had not been so thoroughly upset by a global pandemic and the cascade of economic, political, health, social, and interpersonal consequences branching off from that central cause.

I had other plans, other places to be, and a collection of goals—some of which became irrelevant within the confines of this alternate reality, and some of which were back-burnered in favor of the new, suddenly more important priorities that were spotlighted by that shift.

This is an important mental shift to make when something so dramatic occurs: a change in environment warrants a change in how we apply our efforts, but also a change in our expectations.

If you’ve been training for a marathon but find yourself sitting in a kayak when the starting gun is fired, it’s unlikely all that work you’ve done to prepare and perform will net you the same outcomes. It also wouldn’t make much sense to try to run your way through a kayak race, so a reassessment of how you spend your time and energy once you’ve taken stock of your new circumstances would also seem to be in order.

The upending of expectations is more evident this year because of the unavoidably obvious and widespread disruptions caused by 2020’s seemingly singular source of shambles, but I would argue that such personal realignment should probably be a consistent thing: a semi-regular temperature-taking, rather than a one-off adjustment that we account for and then forget.

That said, within the context of this one pandemic, we’ve seen a slew of wildly diverse outcomes.

Many of these outcomes are predicated on the hands we’ve been dealt—at birth and over the course of our lives, due in some cases to choices we’ve made, but in many cases due to simple chance, happenstance, and the deck being stacked for or against us.

True, uncaring randomness can impact different people in different ways, and that disparity in outcomes is worth keeping in mind as we make judgements about who’s doing what, how, and at what cadence, amplitude, and level of success.

We should probably allow ourselves to make these types of expectation-adjustments more regularly, in other words, because to do otherwise is to compare wildly distinct performances against metrics that may or may not apply.

This is an adjustment that we ideally make for others, when making assessments and assumptions, but it’s just important that we establish the proper context for ourselves, as well.

Not in a way that diminishes our desire to succeed, according to whatever definition of “success” we might personally hold, but in a way that reminds us to take thorough stock of the applicable variables so that we’re more likely to put the goal posts in the right place, don the proper equipment, and move in a way that makes sense for who we are, where we’d like to be, and the position from which we started.

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