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What 2020 Taught Us
And 18 Lessons to Bring Into 2021
Last year, as we celebrated not just a new year but a new decade, we never could have predicted just how tumultuous and life-changing 2020 would be- not just for ourselves, our family, our community, or our country- but for the entire world. It’s true there were a few in-the-know people, like infectious disease specialists and Bill Gates, who predicted a worldwide health pandemic was not just a possibility but an eventual probability. And yes, once it became apparent the virus was not contained in China, people like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Sanjay Gupta did warn us from day one of the long timeline that included multiple waves and surges until a vaccine was developed. But we never could have conceived or truly understood what we were about to be in for:
A once in a century black swan event in the form of an airborne novel Coronavirus would put us all on lockdown and change life as we knew it as it crossed every continent and affected every single human being on this planet.
2020 has taken a lot out of us. It will undoubtedly go down in the history books as a year full of unprecedented unpredictability and uncertainty, a year that felt more like a decade. Our now daily Zoom meetings began with jokes about 2020 being never-ending, like “Happy 256th day of March” or “Happy 7th Monday of the week.”
The CDC predicts the U.S. virus deaths, currently nearing 300,000, could approach half a million by February bracing us all for a very dark winter. Add job losses, school closures, the inability to hug our loved ones, the West Coast burning, flooding of the Southern Coast, Black Lives Matter protests shining a light on how deep-rooted racism still is, and our political system illuminating a bitterly divided country further fueled by misinformation on Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook- and 2020 feels like an actual dumpster fire.
