Before this year even started it was dubbed the year of perfect vision. It was supposed to be the year of clarity and clarification and of people leveling up in their lives. Then the world came crashing to a halt and between the Corona Virus that hit us like a tanker truck and the police brutality that has had a shiny spotlight placed on it which has led to social unrest that we haven’t seen the likes of possibly since the civil rights movement, people are just exhausted: mentally, physically, and emotionally.
We’ve essentially been on lockdown for the better part of this year and have had protests and marches to try to combat racial injustices across the country simultaneously. On top of that we’ve lost so many people as well as influential celebrities this year, some to COVID-19 and some to other illnesses like the most recent loss of Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther) which hit really hard for the black community and especially our younger black children who finally got to see a superhero on the big screen that looked like them.
Even with all of that I am still willing myself to see the positive somehow because it doesn’t do any good to dwell and sit in the negative. 2020 may have not been the clarity and clarification that everyone thought we were going to get this year but I implore you to see just how this has actually lived up to the year that people thought it would, it just didn’t look the way that people thought it was going to. I think that if people truly think about what they gained from this year instead of solely focusing on what they might have missed out on or lost then you may be able to see it the way I see it.
Obviously I’m not saying that we should have had the record number of deaths that we have had since COVID-19 hit us because in my mind nobody’s life is ever expendable. However, the lockdown that has transpired in light of COVID-19 has not only slowed some people down who might have needed to slow down a bit, but it also gave something to all of those people who I hear say they would spend more time with their family if only they had the time.
Well during the lockdown, unless you were a frontline worker, you had nothing but time to spend with your children and your loved ones and to focus on so many things that you would have ordinarily taken for granted. For writers with full time jobs who were sidelined due to the lockdown, you then had plenty of time to actually sit down and write the book that you always claimed you never had time for.
Also, during the lockdown, I’m not sure if you all are aware of this, but the hole that was growing in the ozone layer actually had a chance to shrink because everyone was at home and the earth could finally breathe. I read reports from people who lived in places where the air was normally foggy say that the air was actually clear for a change. For the first time in years Spring actually felt like Spring and not just an early Summer.
In terms of the social unrest, I think that 2020 has highlighted a racial problem this country has that people had either started to believe had gotten better, or their eyes were just closed to the reality of the fact that there is a different American experience for a different set of people in this country. It’s not a reality that is new (especially if you are black in America), it is just a reality that people are actually paying more attention to now. 2020 didn’t bring about these realities, they did however, make people more aware of them.
This year may not be everything that you planned for it to be but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t make some things clearer for a vast majority of people. Hopefully it made it clearer to people what is more important. That there are things that we take for granted and that we have a chance to turn around so that we can refocus on what matters. I hope it made it clear how much damage we have done to this earth, that staying home and essentially not being outside in the world starts to actually heal some of the climate issues that we have been having for a while now. I hope that it peeled back the curtain on the fact that there are two American experiences happening here when there should only be one and maybe people can finally do something about the problem that they were closing their eyes to before.
It’s true, 2020 has been a hell of a year, one like no other, and it’s been hard. Everything that is hard and rough is essentially going to teach us something. The question is are you going to only focus on all that went wrong with this year of perfect vision or are we going to truly see the things that we had already been taking for granted for far longer than we should have been. Our vision was made clear this year, it just wasn’t what we had wanted to see. God always opens our eyes and gives us the ability to see what we need to, but he never said that what we would see would always be pretty. Until next time… #BeFocused #BeMotivated #BeGrateful
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
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