2020 - Personal Reflections - the good and the bad

 

2020 is the year that cannot be passed by without reflecting on it.

It has been a year that united the entire globe by a phenomenon that is probably that single event in the history of mankind that has crossed all boundaries and impacted all countries, because of how connected and mobile the world is today.

All over the world, humans lived through the same dread, same anxiety, same ups and downs of hope and despair.

For those of us that were fortunate to be not impacted directly by the pandemic, it was a year of revelations and forming new habits. As I was hearing in the year end podcast from Shankar Vedantam’s series ‘Hidden Brain’ - old habits are ‘automatic and mindless’, while forming new ones needs us to be ‘conscious and mindful’. And that is probably why 2020 has been so difficult for us. We had to rethink and rewire our everyday life. Find new ways to stay engaged, stay productive and come out relatively unscathed.

On a personal front, while I navigated several changes in my professional life, that required adapting to new technologies in the first few months of the year and new beginnings in the last couple of months, I would not consider that the highlight of 2020 for me.

There are a few things that kept me sane and diverted me from the obsession to check COVID-19 stats and the news.

First – long daily walks and podcasts. I listened to a wide variety but the ones that will stay with me are the entertainment value and food/culture/ethnicity inter dependencies I learnt and absorbed from these two series – ‘Homecooking’ co-hosted by the incredible chef Samin Nosrat with her joie de vivre and ‘Splendid Table’ hosted by food journalist Francis Lam and his diverse set of guests.

My first love, reading, has and will always stay with me – pandemic or no pandemic. But this year, since we missed traveling so much, I tried to fill the void by reading some books on travel and adventure. ‘Rough Magic: Riding the world’s loneliest horse race’ by Lara Prior-Palmer deserves a special mention as the author takes us on this adrenaline driven ride through Mongolian steppes under moonlight nights with nuanced observations about the land and its people.

While traveling was not on the cards in 2020, we did venture outdoors quite a bit enjoying the Seattle mountains and hiking trails. Some long-awaited hikes like Blue Lake or Lake Clara to see the golden larches resplendent at peak were checked off. We spent many hours in spring, summer and fall in the forests of mountain loop highway, watching the spring ground cover of trillium and dogwood give way to beautiful orange and yellow big leaf maples in fall. Hiking uphill through rain and slippery rocks to arrive at an overflowing gorge in Quinault rain forest made us realize the charm of solitude in a rain forest.
We had a fun time chasing Comet Neowise all over Seattle in July , and discovering it rise bright and clear from the Northwest corner of the sky below the Big Dipper from Forsgren Park, literally our backyard. Seeing the tail of the comet so clear even with the naked eye is definitely a once in a lifetime event and will be a positive memory of 2020! 

And the last 2020 development is  very uncharacteristic of me - I got hooked to Netflix and Prime web series! Have had a good time watching some hilarious ones like Kimś Convenience, and some intense ones like Queenś Gambit or Unorthodox that took my breath away. Recommendations from friends poured in on Zoom calls or Whatsapp groups and made me semi knowledgeable on streaming options :) Some Indian web series like Made in Heaven or Panchayat were very enjoyable and an insight into what a mature Indian audience is looking for - real people, real problems. 

On the surface all of this make 2020 look like a good and positive year after all. But the internal longing for normalcy and a certain level of depression is undeniable. The shock that we, as residents of a first world country, can no longer be complacent and ignore problems plaguing the world at large, is huge. Covid yanked us out of our selfish cocoons and showed us how resilient the rest of the world is in the face of disaster, and how much 'growing up' United States of America as a country needs to do.

While in the beginning of the year, I had looked forward to catching up on zoom with friends and family, that has certainly lost its charm, and zoom fatigue is real for me! I have realized that even for introverts like me, the need for in person communication and human connections are primal.

As the year wraps up, I am waiting with hope and trepidation for a time when faces covered with masks and the medicated smell of hand sanitizers, the need for meticulous planning to meet a few friends, the incredibly divisive political atmosphere and an anti science leadership - will all be like a bad dream from the past!