2020HLs: Three most important things I learned this year
By: Rajiv Nair
Tags: 2020, Blogging, Learning, Perseverance, Lessons Learned

A year full of lessons and experiences that were unheard of or incidents that were never recorded in the recent past few decades. Activities restricted to less than nominal and only purely for essential purposes and medical emergencies.

We all were stunned with the amount of new infections that rose around the world starting from tiny regions in a city to an entire country struggling to keep up with the casualties and the increasing number of new cases which in turn brought problems about how to manage hospital beds, ventilators and PPE kits. It wasn’t easy but collectively we’ve all come to better conditions than before. This lesson in perseverance from the humankind in tackling an unknown entity that shook us all with its rapid spreading and the ability to hit people who were vulnerable, it took months of locking ourselves up both for our own safety and that thought to be responsible to the people around us is what makes us what we are.

We realized that we needed social interactions and time with other people in our lives. Be it family, friends and your closed ones, the colleagues who work along with you without whom your work feels even more worse than the work itself. A lot of things that we do needs people around us trying to help us or making easier for us to go along and do things in the usual way just for life to go smoothly. Most people who are outright suckers for interaction with others were the most affected ones and on contrary to that these long lockdowns helped our introvert friends who actually enjoy not being disturbed. We definitely need to find ways to be safer when we’re out but the joy of meeting an old friend after the lockdown was lifted was second to none because it meant you both overcame one of the greatest hurdles humankind has ever faced.

The last and most important thing that I think I’ve learned this year is that only art sustains us.

Art, it could be in any form, will never let us down. From storytelling in books, movies, TV shows to singing, painting, music be it instrumental or songs or just natural sounds , dancing, acting, writing, knitting, animating and every other kind of an expression of the soul. Art does the same to the people who create it and to the people who consume it. We don’t go back to work to relax we find some aveneue where we can enjoy some time for ourselves getting lost in a world that has been created. We are engaged and for a brief time we live a different life in our minds and explore the multiple facets that this life is going to put forward to us.

There are many more things that I might have learnt or am still learning and it is a never ending journey where many more things can be learned at all times we just have to take time and notice things amidst our busy schedules. There is an overabundance of knowledge about the known stuff and there is another another profusion of unknown stuff that this life, universe, nature and people around us have to offer.

Let’s look forward to that and never stop learning.

PS: This is a series of reflections for the year 2020. Do follow for the upcoming posts and do let me know your thoughts.