I feel like I am writing about 2020 in most of my posts lately. I think that is because these next few days mark when things really took a turn in America and we started to realize what might be coming.
As a think back over the last year and what has changed for me personally, for our country, and then entire world I come back to several thoughts but one is just... waste.
We had an opportunity to come together and work together to get through a pandemic and we wasted the chance. Too many people have died, too many relationships have fractured, and too many angry words have been tweeted. We had a chance to come together as a group of people who were facing something we have not seen 100 years, and we let selfishness, fear, and politics divide us even further.
I also wasted too much time personally living in fear and numbing myself with endless scrolling on social media platforms. I wasted time not taking care of myself by eating poorly and not getting much of any exercise. I don’t feel better than I did last year. If I could go back in time, I would handle my personal choices in a different manner.
But, we can’t go back. Unlike LOST (one of my favorite TV shows), we can’t go back; we have to move forward. The question now is not “did we waste 2020?” That’s pretty easy to answer. The question now is, what will we do with the time that we have in the future. Will we learn from the past, or will history continue to repeat itself once again?
I am going to try and move forward and make the best of what is ahead. I know I can’t get it all right, and there are surely going to be circumstances that come up personally and in the world that will shake my routines, but I am going to try to chance things. I am going to try to make things better and live in a way where I will not look back on this time and think, “what a waste.”
Maybe we can all join together this year as we enter year 2 of pandemic life and work together to make something better for our children and ourselves. I’m going to try; that’s all I really can do.