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Over the next few weeks, my prediction is that you are going to get really tired of people saying what a bad year 2020 has been; the depths of the well of suitable adjectives will be plumbed, as commentators search for new ways to blow a raspberry at a year which must rank right up there with a loved one’s funeral for laughs.
But, wait. Has 2020 not taught you anything? Before you let the nativity become a scene of negativity, think about this. This year has taught us much more than the meaning of an ‘R’ number, the aerosol range of droplets in a human cough, and the percentage of alcohol needed to break-up a virus (remember you can’t kill one, as we have all learnt this year, they are not alive in the first place).
2020 has taught us more than the number of times BoJo can talk BoJollocks, Trump can argue that 2 + 2 = I win, and Sweden can say “what lockdown?”
As a year, it isn’t just limited to redefining the acceptable norms of public policy, or cleaning out the governmental bank account, leaving only a small note reading “Tax just got a lot more taxing,” tacked with a piece of used chewing gum to the dusty bottom of the vault.
For many, it has been about the utter pointlessness of adding the word ‘self’ in front of ‘isolation,’ which as a word, had been doing just fine all on its own up to now, thank you, with no need of a tautologous prefix.
Oh, yes. You might have thought 2020 was all about poetry which should never have escaped the clammy clutches of the writer’s ego, conspiracy theories on social media which made the ‘grassy knoll’ in Dealey Plaza (Dallas, November 1963) rival the Bodleian Library as a repository of truth and accuracy – and ministers who really should have listened to the silence of their bathroom mirror, when they asked, “who is the fairest of them all?” before heading out to front another media briefing.
To define 2020 in terms of masks, mutations and Moderna’s vaccine (other brands are available) is to miss the essential point of what 2020 has been – a little laboriously, I agree – trying to teach us.
With just a few days to go now until the end of the year, here is the big ‘reveal’, the swish of the curtain, the ‘ta-da!’ moment, which at times this year, you could be forgiven for thinking had disappeared forever, suffocated under a burgeoning mountain of slightly soiled PPE.
2020 has been all about...learning to live what you love. Whatever it is, we all have a passion, and 2020 has stripped away all the distractions and forced us to face the one thing which fuels the engine of our lives. In this edition you can read the story of Andy Osbourne, who realised all this long ago – 2020 has simply caught the rest of us up on the secret.
Find your passion, nurture it, celebrate it, enjoy it, don’t live a half-life of continual distraction. 2020 has shown how all that can disappear in an instant.
Enjoy Connect, and here’s to living what you love in 2021.
