BYE BYE 2020

I recall at the beginning of the year, a friend e-mailed an alert about how, when dating documents, one needed to use 2020 in full. It turns out altering records would be too easy if we simply used the abbreviated 0/0/20. At the time I thought, “How prissy is that? Not just another year, oh no … let’s make everybody’s life just that much more aggravating … like a spoiled brat, I’ll make their lives just as difficult as possible.”

Well as we all know, that turned out to be the least of our difficulties with 2020. And dysfunctional does not begin to describe what the infant year became. Psychotic comes to mind. Crazed. Demented. Deranged and batshit also might be added to the lexicon of descriptors. 

But, as 2020 is being kicked to the curb, I have mixed emotions about the universal despair over this past year. Despite the global disaster that Covid-19 has wrought, the last ten months of isolation have given me gifts that I didn’t know I wanted or needed.

Friendships … both old and new … have flourished in the zoom-oosphere where distance becomes meaningless. I am thankful to live in a world where electronic communication is there to tap into other worlds. And though my phone had a nervous breakdown this fall from overwork and stress, and the new one is still learning to speed dial, I am never without gratitude for the lifeline that it is. 

Exercise, once the bane of my existence, has become the great emancipator. While walking, I safely encounter the outside world and greet neighbors as we pass on opposite sides of the road. Some I only know by their doggy names … Willow’s Mom, Chase’s Dad … but others have become more meaningful as we share this strange new world in which live.

Time has slowed and expanded providing space to do nothing. I have learned to give myself a pass, because there is pretty much nothing on today’s To-Do list that needs to be done today. Chill has become my new mantra.

Creativity has been and gone and only recently returned. Where it will ultimately land is unclear. What is clear is I have been forced to restructure the sub-strata of my artistic life, to determine what it is that feeds my artistic endeavors. In the end, I have come to realize my artistic life is its own most important creation. And like much of my life these days it is a work in progress.

Life has indeed become simplified and prioritized in new and unexpected ways. Get up. Eat well. Exercise. Yak. Create. Drink. Sleep. Repeat. Not a terrible agenda.  

But of all the gifts received from 2020, perhaps the most important is what a blessing it is to simply be alive.