GOODBYE 2020,
WELCOME 2021
BY DR. NURIT ISRAELI
“I think that I am kinda done
Can we just get to 2021?”
– Song by Avenue Beat
January 1, 2020, marked the onset of a new
decade, welcomed by many as an exciting
new beginning, filled with opportunities for
growth and improvements. But reality differed
widely from expectations. As one of my favorite
writers, Wallace Stegner, wrote in one of my
favorite novels, Crossing to Safety:
“You can plan all you want to. You can lie
in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks
with schemes and intentions. But within a
single afternoon, within hours or minutes,
everything you plan and everything you have
fought to make yourself can be undone...”
In his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Angle
of Repose, Stegner described a prerequisite for
coping well with the unplanned:
“Wisdom...is knowing what you have to
accept.”
When a new year is at the gate, I like to
ask friends and colleagues to choose a word
or a phrase depicting the departing year. The
shared descriptions of year 2020 were much
more dramatic than the portrayals of previous
years: “a nightmare,” “confusing,” “sobering,”
“shocking,” “tragic,” “chaotic,” “catastrophic,”
“the year of the Zoom,” “the year of fear,” “the
year of don’t come near,” “no lipstick and no
Corona beer,” and for some: “the worst year
ever.”
2020 has been the year of the plague. A pandemic
which brutalized the world shaped the
way we were. In addition to the tragic loss of
so many lives, there were lockdowns, health
threats, economic problems, racial tensions,
natural disasters, social upheaval, political
chaos, and mass protests. We lived through
these events. We were touched by them directly.
We saw them daily on our television sets and
via social media. They left us shaken. Unlike
previous afflictions, Covid-19 was not some
event happening in a distant part of the world.
It was not abstract news. It was happening right
here, and it affected each of us in one way or
another. There was collective grief – a common
sense of loss.
8 NORTH SHORE TOWERS COURIER ¢ December 2020