26 Dec What does the future hold?
This year has been incredibly hard. Whatever you thought was going to happen in 2020, I doubt any of us would have predicted this. The future has always been scary but right now, I find it terrifying. My life has changed a lot this year – I moved to a different province, started grad school, all in the midst of the world going through the biggest change I’ve ever seen.
To be honest, it’s been harder than I care to admit. In March, it was just another disease. I’d survived hearing the news of SARS, H1N1, Ebola and other pandemics before without any real changes in my life. Why would I believe that Covid-19 would break the mold? It absolutely shattered that mold.
It’s been lonely, I’m living in a city of over a million people, I think I know five. I haven’t really seen the people I love; I haven’t had the chance to connect to a church or a club or any real community groups. And this year, that’s become the status quo. The whole world is isolated in ways that no one would have imagined before this year. And it is scary, it is hard, it is depressing. And maybe, maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to be scared, maybe it’s okay to be struggling. If Covid has taught us anything, it’s that humans are the most resilient creatures on this planet.
That seems absurd, right? The world’s gone wild over some virus too small to even see, but I’m trying to pull resilience out of this. Maybe it is absurd, but I honestly believe it. Throughout 2020, we have fought for equality, for the end of systematic racism. We have supported one another more this year than ever before. I worked in a hospital over the summer, and the community was so supportive of front-line workers. After moving to Montreal, I’ve seen signs everywhere saying “Ca va bien aller”, meaning that everything is going to be okay. People have been generous, caring and compassionate. And that’s the reason why I believe the signs, why I believe that everything will be okay. Because people around the world have seen the adversity surrounding us and decided that it was time to do something good. Yeah, bad things have happened too, but we’re still standing. And we’re standing together.
So, 2020 sucks. Things might not be okay right now, it might take a long time for things to start to feel normal again, but we can make it through this, together. We’ve survived the past 10 months. I had a coach tell me once that you can do anything for a minute. All we need to do to survive, is to make it through this minute. If you make it through this one minute, this one second in time, you can make it through the next one. And then the one after that. And eventually, a minute becomes an hour. An hour becomes a day, and before you know it, another year has gone by and you are still alive, still breathing.
So, what does the future hold? I don’t know. But I do know that I’m going to hang on long enough to find out.