Goodbye, 2020. I've learned a lot, but it's time to go

So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye 2020!

I'll skip the adjectives. They're all overdone. I'll mostly even skip the bad, of which there has been so much, and get to what 2020 has taught me.

I learned about the elasticity of time — how it can seem to pass both quickly and slowly, with days blurring into each other.

When working means never leaving home, there are no imperatives to be somewhere. With nowhere to go, one is put in mind of Downton Abbey's dowager countess demanding to know what a weekend is.

Yet, Canadians are lucky. We have weather and seasons that have helped order the endless days.

My expat friend, Catherine, once remarked while I was visiting her in Bali that the island has no weather — or more precisely, the weather never changes. Without seasons, she said, not only do days blur into each other, so too do full years and even decades.

Away from the equator, people mark memories by seasons. They write songs about them, although there seems to be a propensity for those long, lazy days of summer versus the cold, dark days of winter.

With little opportunity to venture from home, I've had nothing but time to witness my neighbourhood changing, from daffodils through cherry blossoms and magnolias on to the gardens of summer, then a final spectacular burst of unusually brilliant red maple leaves.

Now, in the gloom of the shortest days, I've already seen the first budding daffodils.

Weather was always a conversational stopgap in this country. It's partly because so many Canadians' lives depend on knowing whether summer will bring drought or floods, and whether winter will bring sea ice, clear skies or blizzards.

In these COVID times, even urban West Coasters find their lives and conversations revolving around the weather. If there's only a 30-per-cent chance of rain, let's go for a walk. If there's an 80-per-cent chance of sunshine, maybe we could have a socially distanced picnic and I'll bring the glühwein.

A 50-per-cent chance of rain? Sorry, I'll be busy. The line at the grocery store will be shorter.

I've come to appreciate how weather forecasting has improved. It's precise enough that, on some of those marginal days when I've dawdled, rain arrived exactly on schedule.

This year has also taught me to appreciate the people who really make the city and country function.

It's taken seeing them in PPE in the early days of the pandemic, when the rest of us were working from home, to realize that they're the clerks, taxi drivers, delivery people, cleaners, plumbers and electricians, and not the politicians so often quoted in the news.

Of course, we've all long known that health care workers are essential in a life-and-death way. Certainly the pandemic has underscored their worth.

But personal experience in 2020 has taught us that the best health care providers perform minor miracles daily — not with medicine, but kindness.

Still, there's a lot I didn't learn this year. I still don't know how to bake bread, knit, paint, draw or play an instrument.

I haven't written a book. I haven't even read any books of real consequence. I've eschewed reading for the happy endings of cooking and home renovation shows on TV.

For sanity's sake, I mostly passed on things American up until the final days of an election that some people still can't seem to accept is over.

I've travelled vicariously through the words of writers telling stories from beyond North America. I've learned to love BBC World, not least of which for its daily reminder of what a privilege it is to live in a peaceful country.

But over the year, we've all learned in sharp and searing detail that, despite the early bravado that we're all in this together, we are ... and we're not.

So many have died. So many are still suffering from COVID itself, from anxiety, loneliness, job loss, businesses collapsing and fears about the future, even with the advent of vaccines.

That suffering hasn't been equally distributed.

But COVID has also taught us that saying something is impossible doesn't mean it has to be.

With unprecedented speed, researchers came up with a vaccine, and right-wing governments jettisoned slavish devotion to social penury in favour of spending for the public good.

For a long time, we've been told that poverty, homelessness, addictions, gender and racial inequality are intractable problems, impossible to solve.

Well, in 2021 as the post-pandemic rebuilding begins, perhaps we'll learn that they're not.

RICHARD LAM Two men in English Bay watch as the sun seems to slowly set on 2020, a year when days so often simply blurred into one another.