2020 has passed: there are three words I honestly didn’t think I’d ever say. In some ways, it feels like the year lasted a decade; in others, it feels more like one blurry clump of nothingness. It was a long one, a dark one, and a lonely one any way you slice it. But, if you can stand yet another cliché message of hope, there’s a candle flickering now from somewhere far off. If I squint, I can see the orange glow. If I had to describe the past year to someone in the future, I’d say this: imagine waiting at an airport for a year-long layover that never ends, all the while waving at your friends and family in the distance as they stand on the other side of the security lineup.
Hang on just a few more months. My prediction is that by January 2022, we will all be able to hug whoever we want without hesitation.
Obviously, 2020 wasn’t the easiest year, but I would be steering myself amiss if I didn’t take a second to highlight some of the positive aspects of lockdown. One of those is the quiet. Another is the idea of working from home, at least part time. It doesn’t make sense—period—for companies to shovel out cash for overhead in the 2000s, an era of technological power. If you’re anything like me, you’re divided down the middle on the matter of working from home—it’s nice in some ways and suffocating in others.
Up until fairly recently, part of the sense of meaning that we took away from the world came from our sense of place. These days, it’s very hard to figure out how to move forward, or how to find that vague sensation that falls somewhere between tolerance and contentment, when we’re stuck between the same four walls every day.
I’m no less or more stuck than I was before. Moving around has been—and will be again some day—a primary way that we convince ourselves that there’s more to the world and the way we fit into it than there actually is.
That vague sense we all have right now of cabin fever? That’s the truth. Because it’s not our sense of place that has been up in the air, it’s the sense of grounding that we take from that sense of place.
Part of the reason I found meaning and assurance in my job was that, every morning, at 9 am sharp, I’d be sitting at the same desk, talking to the same people, doing the same thing—things that were utterly and completely separate from the rest of my life. They’re not so separate now, so the sense of meaning gets blurry. It doesn’t disappear; it just gets harder to see.
2021 is going to be better, different, and revolutionary… right? It has to be.
But here’s the tough part: you have to find all this within yourself. Between these same four walls, there’s no more relying on the world outside of you.