Finding the Good in 2020

Everyone everywhere is hollering about how horrible 2020 has been and how relieved they are to welcome the New Year. I don’t disagree, but I always like to look on the brighter side of things.

On Thanksgiving, as my little family sat at the table eating a rather nontraditional meal, we took turns sharing what we’re most thankful for. OK, truthfully, I forgot about this tradition until after we’d finished eating, and I had to gather everyone back at the table to do this … but whatever. The important thing is that we got to share personal thoughts of thanksgiving, and my 17-year-old son shared something poignant. He said, “I’m thankful for the coronavirus.” When pressed to elaborate, he said, “It has taught us to be problem solvers.”

Now, I know he was just clowning around, as 17-year-old boys tend to do sometimes, but I actually want to examine this idea more closely. Without minimizing the devastation that Covid-19 has caused many families around the world, I would posit that there have been some blessings hidden within the madness. And I believe focusing on the blessings is how we can overcome the hardships.

Blessing #1

When Covid first disrupted our lives last spring, I was in a rough spot mentally and physically in my career. I had 10 pounds of stress and a 9-pound bag. I was so tired, anxious, and stretched to my limits. Then we had spring break, a welcome relief. Then we were told not to come back for another week, and then another. While scrambling to figure out how to provide effective dyslexia therapy virtually (and overcome internet connectivity issues) was a whole new kind of stress, a remarkable thing happened that I count as a blessing: Life slowed down. When you subtract the time it takes to get ready for work, the time it takes to drive to work, and the time it takes to drive home from work, you suddenly have a significant amount of time to relax, to tend to your family, or to tend to yourself. Not to mention, all of a sudden we had nowhere to go, so we went on walks down the road, we had more meals together as a family, we spent more time just … being.

Blessing #2

Yellow-crowned night heron exploring my pond

As stay-at-home orders expanded and extended, there was a noticeable move away from material things and toward nature. Instead of going to shopping malls or restaurants, families were visiting parks or having picnics in the backyard. It was during quarantine that I photographed at least five snake sightings around our property, a turtle laying her eggs out back, a yellow crowned night heron eating crawdads from our pond, ducks visiting our pool, and chickens crossing the road down at the end of our street (obviously, I asked them why). Society’s affinity for nature ramped up everywhere I looked — on TV, on social media, and all around me in real life (imagine that, seeing more and more families going on walks together in the neighborhood and at local parks).

Plain-bellied water snake (nonvenomous) on my front porch

A red-eared slider laying and burying her eggs just off our patio by the pond

A broad-banded copperhead (venomous) out front after a heavy rain. Thankfully, it moved along with a little coaxing. We did not kill it.

Blessing #3

While I honestly experienced many more blessings this year, the last one I want to highlight is, I think, the most significant: the push toward normalizing and honoring self-care. “Self-care” seems like the new buzzword everywhere you look right now, and for good reason. Pre-Covid, working yourself to death, even when sick, was expected, even glorified. Now, it is understood that taking good care of your health is not only the right thing to do for yourself, but it’s also better for everyone else. Employers seem to be coming around to the common-sense fact that people need to stay home if they’re sick, and they don’t need any guff about it. Even more, mental health is finally making its way into the spotlight — in a good way. As we all deal in different ways and at different levels with isolation, missing family, losing loved ones, adjusting to what some insist is a “new normal,” a focus on nurturing our mental health is gaining traction. For this I am eternally grateful. As a full-time working mom, as a woman, as a worrier by nature, “mom guilt” has plagued me for 17 years now, driving my anxiety to the maximum. But now, because of a global pandemic, no less, society is finally declaring that we don’t have to feel guilty for such things as taking time for ourselves, declining a phone call, saying no. And oh what a relief that is.

Even though, like everyone else, I am eager to see this year come to a close, and I am praying and hopeful for a better 2021, I choose to focus on the sliver of positive buried under the trash heap of 2020. Albus Dumbledore said it best in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”