Not To Be Trusted With Knives

2020 Wrap Up

January 1, 2021 by Beth

I was intending to write this posting, along with the other two I posted earlier today, last evening after I finished watching the World Juniors Canada vs. Finland game on Zoom with my friends, Cath and Mel. Except that we had so much fun watching that game that we continued on Zoom to watch the Sweden vs. USA games and then other friends joined and then somehow the how evening got away from me. I regret nothing.

I actually don’t want to spend much time recapping 2020, because we all know it was a dumpster fire. I would just like to point out that I called 2020 as a crap year on Feb 6, and then doubled down on that on Mar 2, well before the pandemic was declared. The lesson here is that the world should go out of its way to make sure my new year starts off well, lest the world fall into calamity.

What I’d rather write about is that what I learned from living through the worst year that I’ve personally experienced:

Patience. 

I’m not a patient person by nature, but so much of this year required waiting, that I got a lot of practice at being patient. Whether it was waiting for the COVID-19 vaccines to be developed (which, while remarkably fast in terms of vaccine development, felt like an eternity to wait for) and now waiting until it’s one’s turn to get the vaccine, waiting for the early pandemic shutdown measures to be lifted in the late spring (so I could go back to the gym, to restaurants, to my massage therapist, etc.) and now waiting for our social restrictions to be lifted (which I feel will be a long wait!), or just in a lineup to get into the grocery store (due to decreased number of people allowed in store these days, we did a lot of waiting in 2020.  I do feel like I’m less impatient than I was a year ago, so I guess practice makes progress, right?

Gratitude. 

I saw a meme on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or some such social media platform that said something to the effect of 2020 not being the year we get everything we want, but being the year that we appreciate what we have. I am so unbelievably lucky to have a safe home, a stable income, and the health of myself and my loved ones. This year I spent a lot of time being grateful for what I have and I think that has been good for me.

Surrender.

I’ve long been a fan of the idea behind the serenity prayer, but this year I’ve felt it more deeply. A pandemic really helps you understand “the things you cannot change” and being able to accept that for what it is rather than to try to resist reality has struck me this year. Surrender doesn’t mean that you have to like what’s happening or that you have to give up – it just means that you accept its existence. 

In conclusion, glad I learned these things, but would have preferred to learn them from a less extreme circumstance.

Good riddance to 2020, let us never speak of it again.

Image credit: Image from Wikimedia Commons, shared with a Creative Commons license.

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