2020. A year described by many as the following: A dumpster fire, shit show, kerfuffle, nightmare come true, omnishambles, hullabaloo, all hell broken loose, catastrophe, three ring circus, royal fuck up, comedy of errors, bizarre, unrivaled, hellacious, apocalyptic, calamity, and a world turned upside down.

WHO reports that, as I write this, over 74 million people have contracted the virus worldwide. I read in the Wall Street Journal that a quarter of all US jobs were disrupted as a result of the pandemic. The election divided us. Racial inequities lead to murders and riots. Fires and storms wreaked havoc on and devastated our habitats. Our ways of living, communicating, and interacting have all been upended and recreated. It’s not surprising that there has been a collective yearning for 2020, and all that came with it, to end and to never be thought of again.

But should old times be forgot and never brought to mind?

Uncertainty, worry, and feeling useless all took their toll and caused depression, an old acquaintance of mine, to rear its ugly head. But as time has shown, I’m a survivor who does not relish in pity parties. I also can’t be idle, no matter how often I think I ought to give it a try.

And so I move. And I do. And I retrain my brain to think positively and make the best of a situation. And that takes work. And it’s because of that energy and movement that, despite the headlines, I am grateful for this year.

This year has gifted me with the time and permission to think. I mean really think. Like not just about what I have to do that day, but go deep into the recesses of my brain and think about all of the things I usually don’t have the time or energy to think about. And there is a lot of stuff in there! I wrote some of it down in this blog, which I’m happy to have had the time to create this year. Other thoughts I wrote in the journal I’ve been keeping for my daughter since I was pregnant. Others I shared with my friends, because they also had time to just sit and think and ponder life with me. And some I just shared with God, because at the end of the day it’s just me and Him, and I can’t fool either one of us. I wonder if having and spending all of this time thinking is how the Ancient Greek philosophers felt in their day-to-day lives.

For the last few years, life was moving so quickly, and I didn’t feel like I could keep up at times. This year, time seemed to slow. I had time to play with my daughter. Time to try new things. Time to reintroduce old things. Time to contemplate and assess where I had been, where I was, and where I was going. And it has all made me feel a lot better about life. What began as a joke between friends became the mantra “We Are Here,” which we now repeat at our get-togethers. There’s something to be said for living in the moment. And so in 2021, as life starts to speed up again, my resolution is to make it a point to slow down and make time for the important stuff that, for reasons I still need to think about, I had put on the back burner.

And so 2020, for auld lang syne my dear, I’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.