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pjstafford · 4 years

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A Look at my 2020

The end of the year is upon us. It’s been a tough one for all of us. It is a year we will all remember forever. I want to do a positive reflection of this year. I will probably write a blog about what I hope our country’s New Years Resolutions should be. The thoughts on that have been rolling around my head for a few days. But today, December 16, at 4:30 a.m. and unable to sleep, that 2020 familiar dread of what will happen today waking me early, I want to look at some positives. I want to unwrap the positives of 2020 like a Christmas gift before Christmas so that I can wrap myself in them as a blanket of warmth. One thing that I have been truly impressed with is the resilience of the human spirit. Let’s call this a resilience exercise.

Counting my blessings one by one...

1. I am alive. Surviving is a cause for celebration. As far as I know I have been COVID free...although there were a few days in April or early May when I was sick with something and in Feb I had the strangest cold in my life and this time last year weeks of fatigue ended in frozen shoulder syndrome on Christmas Eve. See, I want to be thankful, but I don’t want to be naive in my retrospection. Best to be honest. I’m not sure if I had COVID or not, but if I did I survived with relatively minor symptoms. Every cough or sniffle I feared in a completely irrational way was COVID. There was the week I walked around sniffing everything to make sure I could still smell. It dawns on me it is going to be difficult to write a honest and, yet, positive, retrospective of 2020. I am alive, but I have never been less healthy. I’ve gained weight. I haven’t had the physical exercise to which I am accustomed and now when I try to take a long walk I realize my stamina is gone. It will take years of concentrated effort once things are “back to normal” for me to become normal again. It wasn’t that I didn’t try. I did yoga daily in the Spring and switched to an online Tai chi class in the summer, but I don’t live near beauty or anything interesting so wasn’t motivated to walk and just my everyday life of lockdown in a studio apartment meant less movement. All of which sounds even to me like not very good justification. Did I mention though that I survived. I am alive. I will take that as blessing number one.

2. No one I care about very deeply has died or even been seriously ill from COVID. Doesn’t March 2020 seem far away? I don’t want to be dismissive of 300;000 dead especially with more to come. I or someone I love could still be gone by New Years Day. But in March and April we held our breaths for an apocalypse and at some point most of us decided to take a breath. I don’t know really if it’s good or bad that we have simply adjusted our normal and the number deaths we are willing to accept. It’s bad, what am I saying? It’s bad. But how long can we wait in fear? So I don’t know, but I want to count as a blessing that those I love have all survived to date. I cannot vanquish the fear, but I can be grateful for survival.

3. I have maintained employment in a bad economy and have mostly been able to work from home. There have been some struggles. Sometimes the work I do is depressing. Sometimes I feel I don’t make a difference. There has never been a worse time to be an advocate...or a person with disability, or a caregiver, or a provider agency, or a health care professional. I have maintained employment.

4. I count among my blessings the fact that I had a wonderful 2020 before....remember there was a 2020 before. I love when my work takes me to Santa Fe for a prolonged time. A friend came out in Feb for a wonderful weekend. Another friend came to Albuquerque to see me for my birthday in early March. I remember thinking how social I was in those first ten weeks in 2020. It’s as if I somehow knew....it sustained me.

5. I count among my blessings that when I felt my mental health despair getting at its worse...the strain of living alone in a studio apartment, working from that same apartment and following the Governor orders not to go or do anything. ..that I had friends and two weekends of “risky” behavior; a friend who came for the Fourth of July holiday and an out of state trip to Durango in late September. I’m fortunate that when I had to have human contact my closest friends were there for me

6. I count as my blessings that Biden won the election. It’s not simply a matter of politics. I’m not sure if the last eight months of the Trump Presidency wasn’t worse for my morale than the pandemic because Trump kind of lost whatever semblance of sanity he had. Part of the trepeditation over what each new day will bring is what Trump will say, do, tweet, exacerbate. I still fear revolution in the street before Jan 20. The pandemic is not the worse of what America has gone through. That’s the oddest thing about this year.

7. Here is the blessing which probably will be unpopular. The lockdown and stress of all we have experienced is tough, but the slowdown is a blessing for me. My life had gotten pretty busy. While I miss travel, it’s ok for a year not to have had the time suck that travel for work entails. I will be so happy the first work trip I get to go on, but I feel like 2020 has given me the gift of time. It’s odd because, like many, my creative sense has suffered. I have written almost nothing. Still, I often think of a Dylan lyric, maybe in the next life I will be able to hear myself think. I could hear myself think this year. Unfortunately I thought about the existentialist angst of the meaning of life and my failures as a human being and I don’t think there is enough time still to process the effects of the pandemic and I’m sick to death of the sound of my thoughts, but....I have been given this unique gift of time. Even on December 16th I am not rushed to shop, to cook, to decorate, to go to a zillion parties. It’s a different year. The Holiday will still come. It is pleasant not to feel urgency over, let’s face it, non-urgent things. I am mentally and emotionally fatigued, but not nearly as physically exhausted as I was this time last year

8. The next one is a big one. The gift of living in the moment. I have spent my entire life since 7th grade when Miss O’Neil gave me a copy of The Rubyait of Omar Khayyam trying to live with the philosophy of living for the now. Clear the cups of past regrets...tomorrow, why I may be myself with yesterday’s seven thousand years. The only time I have ever truly experience this is in a handful of concert experience. Even now, I fear for my future and I blame myself for my mistakes. Still, my relationship with time has changed. There is the sun rising and setting and that is a day. Seasons will change. But the gift of time means I can approach my day differently. When five o clock comes on a workday, a needed nap is a step away. No where to go on a Friday night... no where I can go...means the weekend rhythm exists only as I define it. The simple pleasures we always take for granted mean something more now. There is a coffee truck that stops near me on Fridays and Saturdays. When it first started stopping I was over the moon that I could walk and get a latte with fairly little risk. If I go to the grocery store and have a conversation with a stranger, it is different than it was before. Mindfulness exercise and meditation is one thing, but nothing can compare with this year to further my lessons in this pursuit. May I take the lesson with me into years to come.

9. Zoom...yes, of course I have zoom fatigue. But five friends in five different states having a monthly drink together on zoom is a benefit of the pandemic. I watched a movie this year with someone who lives in Brazil. I celebrated a friend’s sixtieth person even though I couldn’t be with her. I’ve attended book discussions and readings in New York and I already have tickets to an event in March. Kind of love New York. I’ve never been there in person. Just a lot happens there. Educationally and socially the world is now open to me. I am not limited to what is going on in my community. I hope this doesn’t completely go away.

10. Finally, storytelling and music. I found it hard to read new things in the lockdown for a while, but in March friends asked me to a virtual book club of three books I already read and we reread them together which took us into the summer. I rediscovered the Foundation series of Asimov and suddenly I could read again! My favorite book I’ve read published in 2020 is Jess Walter’s The Cold Million. I did read a digital advance copy of David Duchovny’snew book due out in 2021 and it is, in fact, the breakout novel I knew this hot young writer would eventually write. Looking forward to 2021 book club! I finally binged Breaking Bad and The Travelers as well as The Queens gambit and watched Peanut Butter Falcon. I am doing a disability focused watch on the X Files and I better kick it it the rear because I’m presenting on it in Feb. at a conference. My God, Dylan put out his first original music in eight years. It will take me eight years to fully ingest it and enjoy it. You see, no matter what happens, humanity will tell its stories and gather to make its songs. It’s that human resilience. Creation of art is not trivial. It’s vital. It has continued in this odd and strange year. It is humanity’s greatest gift and I have definitely used it this year as a resilience and growth tool.

Those are my top blessings in this horrific and, yet, wondrous year. However, you have been impacted, what we all share in common is that In a very short time it will be a memory of a year in the past.

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