On 2020 and becoming

On this New Year’s Eve, the day we look back over our shoulder at the year that was, where to start? It’s been a year unlike any other for most of us. It’s been a year that we are ready to say good riddance to.

I’m right there with you.

So, on behalf of all of us, “Good riddance, 2020! Here’s to a better 2021!”

But if I am being completely honest, as deep and as painful as my personal lament for 2020 has been, I also stand here at the threshold of 2021 grateful for the ways that it has shown me something about the person I have been and am still becoming.

I’m not sure that I would call my “takeaways” a silver lining. Too cliche for me. Sounds too much like optimism. Optimism is not a bad thing, but it’s not what’s gotten me through.

I see what 2020 has given to me as light that shines in the darkness. The stubborn kind of light that keeps us from being completely lost and completely alone. It persists. Patiently. Even when we don’t have the energy to keep looking for it.

Light, it seems to me, is like hope. It just is.

Despite COVID-19, despite the graphic ways we watched our black brothers and sisters being unnecessarily killed before our eyes, despite raging wildfires and incessant hurricanes, despite a dysfunctional Congress and partisan politics that have divided families, friends and a nation, despite millions of newly unemployed and millions who live on the edge of eviction and millions who aren’t sure where their next meal will come from, we’ve all had to go about living our own lives and all that life brings.

What was it for you? What were the laments, the hurts, the losses that you lived with in addition to all that has happened to us collectively? Take a moment to name them, to acknowledge them. For they are real.

For me it was family health scares. Family brushes with death. Family hurt. Since January it has been a steady drumbeat of fear and loss. Even today, on the last day of 2020, my brother-in-law remains on a ventilator as his body fights the scourge that is COVID-19. COVID-19 is as real as it gets.

And yet, the light that shines in the darkness remains lit.

It may burn brighter on some days than others, but it is there.

Persistently and patiently it meets us where we are. On any given day. In any given hour. In any given second.

Standing on the threshold of 2021, I look back on 2020 and see the places where light has brought life to parts of my world.

Family bonds have been strengthened. Steps have been taken to diagnose and manage familial health conditions. Family members and health care workers took swift and skilled actions to save precious lives. The unknown has become known. The hard-to-have conversations have started to happen with people who don’t look like me. I’ve developed a new daily writing practice and found an online community with fellow creatives who are also experimenting in their chosen medium.

Hard to say, but I’m not sure these things would all be true if 2020 had been a walk in the park.

Despite the physical distancing we have had to live with, I’m not so sure I would feel as connected to others as I do on this side of 2020. This has not been the year to go it alone. Rather, this has been the year to take stock of who we are in the wider sense of things.

Who am I to my siblings? Who am I to my children and my husband? Who am I to my neighbor, to the cashier at Sprouts, to the people I lead at work?

All this is not to say that I would do 2020 all over again. I could certainly imagine taking a do-over if one was offered.

2021 will start tomorrow. We all hope that it finishes in a much healthier, happier way than 2020 does. But the reality is that when we wake up tomorrow morning, most of what has been so bad about this year will not be any better.

While we can’t fix all that is wrong right now, we do have a new day to see ourselves as always becoming.

Call it the person you were born to be. The person you are called to be. The person you are capable of being. The best version of yourself. Call it whatever seems right to you.

What 2020 has given me is a lens to see myself and my relationship to others in a new way.

To those I know, I am grateful to know you better.

To those I don’t, I think if a pandemic has taught us anything, it is that six degrees of separation are really five too many. We cannot escape our connectedness to one another. Nor can we escape the power that it has to bring light into the dark places in the world.

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On Further Thought

A poem – The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry