Hindsight is 2020 in rear view
“Twenty-twenty [will] be my year of plenty-plenty.”
— Thaddeus Matthews, aka “The Cussing Pastor”
“It was the worst of times, it was the ‘worstest’ of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the age of downright Cray-Cray, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the epoch of “Wait, whaaaat?”, it was the season of darkness, it was the season of Night Goggles Can’t Fix This, it was the winter of despair, it was the Ice Age of “Come on, man!!!!”
— A “Jeopardy” clue presented by the late, beloved Alex Trebek, the answer to which would be “What is the year 2020?”
This is my pre-New Year’s column, which I felt was needed because, whew, it’s been a ride.
Yeah, talking about the election as well as about this year. Whether your candidate won or not, take heart. We’re in the home stretch of 2020.
Let me emphasize right now that the turn of the year obviously won’t guarantee that we’ll step out of the trouble and chaos of 2020. Trouble and chaos don’t work that way. Those two dudes don’t say, “Hey. You know what? A new year is about to come. We’d better get in the last of our partying because next year is supposed to be peaches and cream.” And I can’t count the times I was relieved to see an old year go, just knowing my life was going to hit pay dirt that new year … only to be hit in the face with some even bigger pies.
But man, it’s the psychology of the thing, and that psychology is so much stronger now. “Plenty-plenty” of mess has been crammed into this calendar year. Even if 2021 does have a rough beginning, hey, we’ll gladly take the high that saying Good Riddance to 2020 will bring us.
We have been knocked repeatedly to our knees, but that light of a new year (not an oncoming train) at the end of the tunnel is the very thing that will keep a lot of us crawling. While we crawl, we can take a bit of joy in the holiday season. Tur-key’s gonna cook. Trees gonna have ornaments. Carols gonna be sung.
Like everything else, the holidays will be heavily edited because of covid-19. But they’ll serve an extra-special purpose. Just ask the folks who were already putting up their Christmas decorations with the fall leaves still on the trees. The end-of-year holidays are not a mere distraction from the gunk. They represent ... hope. Hope that
we can squeeze in some real enjoyment this month and the next. Hope that 2021 will be a bit better than 2020, even if it’s not perfect. Hope that undergirds strength, renews vigor, makes us raise our battered, bloodied heads and focus — then smile — through our tears.
Yes, the finish line is close. This being Thanksgiving Month, I was sent an article on gratitude by Karen Rae, a single “mompreneur,” cancer survivor, founder of Balanced Life by Karen Rae and creator of The Signature Balanced Life Planner (balancedlifeplanner.com).
In “An Attitude of Gratitude: How Being Thankful Can Help You Plan,” Rae shares her best gratitude practices. Journaling is one: “Journaling your gratitude can increase your quality of sleep, increase joy and decrease symptoms of sickness.” She also suggests keeping a gratitude jar for keeping notes of all the good things going on. And, Rae urges us to be grateful when things aren’t so great — “Gratitude is not only about positive things. Dig a little deeper and try to figure out how your own past experiences have helped make you the person you are today” — while challenging us to think of three to five things we’re grateful for daily. (I feel compelled to stop here and urge us to go beyond simply
being grateful that so-and-so was voted out of federal/state/ local office.)
Those latter two admonitions should especially be heeded. What awful, downright miserable things that happened to us this year served to make us more wise, strong, patient, resilient? And what good occurrences have been woven among the bad? I can vouch for the fact that “God does bless in the midst of the mess.”
All this is ammunition to be added to our end-of-year hope crawl. And even if 2021 comes with some pie hits in the face … that’s one way we can say we had dessert.
Thanks for the start of the last of those 2020 emails:
hwilliams@adgnewsroom.com