2020: A year of losses and gains

As 2020 draws to a close and the world reflects on this extraordinary, crazy year we are about to leave behind, it is tempting to focus only on the negatives and losses we suffered.

And we have lost so much: our health, our incomes, our families, our friends, our relationships, our freedoms. It has been an incredibly tough year for most of us. The devastating impact of Covid-19 on the world will be felt for decades to come.

We are exhausted. We can feel it in our bones. We want to reset and start afresh.

But before we hit the red button for 2021 to start, let's pause for a moment and reflect on the gains we made, too. Let me start with myself.

The year we lost our marbles and gained common sense

We as a country, as the world, have experienced a profound, collective trauma this year. As we knuckle down into our daily lives, I think we forget that disruption at the level we felt in 2020, will have a long-lasting effect on our national and individual psyches.

The year I lost my friends

At first, I thrived in having time alone. Time to focus on the helter-skelter of the news superhighway. Time to breathe and enjoy my interests, hobbies and odd obsessions when I did off-ramp from the news highway.

I thought I was navigating life under lockdown as seamlessly as Diego Maradona slalomed through England's defence at the 1986 World Cup.

But, deep-down, I knew it wasn't sustainable, healthy or good.

The year I lost my freedom

For a large part of the last few months, we have been asked to embrace our "new normal". I don’t think normal is the word, not by any stretch of the imagination.

But we have been asked to, and for periods of the various lockdown levels, been forced to give up freedoms which many of us took for granted.

The year I gained my new business

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting back together broken pottery pieces with gold bonding. It’s an art form that resurrects broken ceramic pottery into beautiful art works — Kintsugi (golden joinery) is built on the idea that in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create a more beautiful piece of art.

This is the perspective through which I chose to view my 2020 – that through a process of artfully putting together the broken pieces left by the events of 2020, I will end up with a more beautiful piece.

The year I lost my innocence

The day I heard about the brutal way she died, I had knots in my stomach that took days to loosen up. My body went cold, and I struggled to comprehend how any human would have the audacity to kill a woman who was heavily pregnant.

The year I gained my resilience

I remember staring at the intense blue of the sky in the early days of Level 5. I sat on the dead log outside our door and wept. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you become a parent in a pandemic but no one is around…

The year of the loss of sport, perspective and appreciation

The power of sport was seen in 2019 but, in 2020, came perspective. Live competition - on television and at stadiums - has been missed this year, but more pressing matters of life and death have been sobering. Still, the absence of sport has come at its own cost.

The year I lost my health and my job

It happened within the space of weeks - first my health, then my job.

I remember sitting in a hard and uncomfortable seat at a Cape Town hospital, making awkward small talk with the healthcare worker preparing to poke around in my nose with a nasal swab.

I wasn't particularly afraid of what the results would be - I had done everything right, like covering my face from almost between my eyes all the way to my chin and sanitising even after washing my hands. I was practically the poster child for being careful in the time of coronavirus. I would be fine, right?

Wrong.

The year I gained my future

There are two sides to every reality. The left and the right; the rich and the poor; the past and the future; the angry – and the awakened. These are the forces that mould us and evolve us. They exist in opposites and they function in parallel. They are necessary.

And then, there are choices. The things we say, we do and we decide upon. Forces and choices work together, but they are not the same – and it’s time we knew the difference.

The year I finally gained work-life balance

By opening up our homes to our workplaces due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we may have realised the opportunity to finally achieve the perfect balance between home and work without any of those boundaries that we set up so long ago, believing they achieved sought-after productivity and powerful delivery.