2020 was a dumpster fire…and more
Let’s not kid ourselves. But yeah. Let’s look at it with sober eyes and a healthy dose of hopefulness for the incoming year.
Life is hard. This is humankind’s story in this beautiful, but broken world.
There will always be stories of sickness, death, loss, betrayal, injustice, and other soul-crushing disappointments of many names.
But some years may be easier than most and for these times, we are thankful for the opportunity to just cruise and keep our minds sunny and bright. In these years, it is easy to say, “This is my year!” It is easy to own these years. Easy peasy.
With 2020, sad to say, this isn’t the case. It owned us, got us on our knees or on the floor in fetal position and in tears. “When will this year end?!” was the world’s collective cry.
And sadly, some of us didn’t even make it.
While life has to go on, the global health crisis is undoubtedly ruinous. This is a fact. Sure, we all experience some semblance of normalcy now, but make no mistake. Everyone is affected in one way or another by economic collapse, corruption, illness, and even death, the ultimate irreversible.
It is for this reason— and because the virus is still out there, wreaking havoc — I can’t bring myself to utter with full confidence, “There are still many good things and I am blessed.”
More than feeling imprudent, it is, to me, almost akin to a willful blindness. It’s not that we shouldn’t celebrate the good. It’s that we shouldn’t gloss over the terrible. This is because erasure, although unintentional, to me, feels dismissive of other narratives that are no less true: we did not gain it all and there are many who have lost a lot, if not everything. The old masters knew this very well.
It is from their wisdom I take my cue, so I’d very much rather give way first to mourning by looking at things for what they are. 2020, really, was a huge dumpster fire. Huge.
Commiserate with the lost, the grieving, the hurting, the least, the last, the dying, the dead. Give them your time and honor them in this small way. If you can act to help, all the better. Be a blessing to them.
Yes, there are things to be happy about. You’re alive and didn’t catch COVID. Your loved ones recovered from this dreaded illness. You got to keep your job and even managed to nab a promotion. You finally earned your PhD. You got married. You gave birth to a healthy, beautiful child. You made new, awesome friends and kept all of the old ones. All of these are great, yes. These are the things in our lives that serve as a soothing balm to these challenging days, yet these are the very things that are so easy to take for granted when not pitted against this disaster of a year.
Let’s also remember those who are thrust in the face of difficulty. There are those, the brave and the strong — and yes, the imperfect — , who tirelessly work against immeasurable odds to bring us all back to a place of safety: medical frontliners who put themselves in harm’s way so we don’t have to be, scientists racing against time to develop the best version of the vaccine, leaders in industries who help with business recovery, farmers who till the soil, so we will have something to eat — yes, we look to them and remember that we have it easy because others are working on our behalf.
I do not have Pollyanna glasses — sometimes I wish I had a pair— so it is in this context that I am reminded of the real value of things. I pray that everyone would remember the value of all the happy things, that we receive these blessings because of God’s love and grace.
Who are we to not be in awe, to not feel humbled? These blessings are also reminders of how we should resist being greedy and how we should be kind to others, not just now when there’s a raging pandemic, but for always.
As difficult as it is because humans can sometimes [?]be colossal jerks, we should still do our very best to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
So this is what I want to say: after mourning and seeing things for what they really are, let’s all look forward to 2021 with the intention of being kind to ourselves and to others. Hope is not blind. It stems from the knowledge of what is and what we can do to make things better, even in our small little ways.
I’ll end with a verse from Hebrews 10:24–25, since this essay’s getting a bit too long:
“Let us all consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another…”
This is one way we can, in a more authentic sense in my view at least, welcome the unknown that is the year ahead.
