Looking back: An ode to 2020 — MAN CAVE MAN
It’s the season to look at your purpose in life
Text: Zul Andra
You are exactly where you are supposed to be. As much as you’d have liked the sun to rise at a perfect angle and James Baskett to hum the tune of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” on our windowsills, you knew that time doesn’t always bring with it a picturesque Disney postcard. Looking back on 2020, if the journey so far was any indication of your vulnerability, instability, and despair, the opposite must also be true.
There are billions of combinations to how you got to where you are today. Every one of your actions was met with an equal or opposite reaction — every cause rippling with a tidal wave of effects. There’s an even or disproportionate number of things that you could control. There are those that you couldn’t. Your gut told you one thing, but your hunger pang of ambition befalls you on to another.
You find yourself unable to decide because of the lack of options. You find yourself crippled by decision paralysis because there were just too many choices. You are in a constant state of flux. Your energy was bouncing off the walls of your limitation — walls that were closing in every time you screwed up.
If we draw a red line between the point of where you started, where you are, and where you’re going, the whole canvas is a bloody red flag. The only mountain height you’ve reached was one made out of straws because that’s all that you’ve been grasping at. You plant the red flag on the peak and at some point, wished it was white.
Patience is a virtue
You are exactly where you are supposed to be, and I hope you could see that this is not how you will only be remembered. Just like most things, you knew that “it comes with the territory.” This is the lens through which you have seen the world. That things that were supposed to mess up came with something that did not. A whole package as nature intended it to be.
A seasoned captain of a ship never underestimates the desire and violence that the sea could bring. Pray for smooth sailing over the Atlantic while a Titanic-level disaster could drown the vessel towards the depths of Atlantis.
The pandemic came knocking bearing gifts for humanity of lessons to be learnt. Humans are adaptable creatures, but the contrary is just as true. Patience is a virtue. Loving kindness and empathy were virtues that took time to seep in their thick skin and mind.
A food delivery app brings convenience, but you’ve seen how people reacted when a tub of McDonald’s curry sauce goes missing. The panic, though, started early. Toilet paper, canned food, and face masks were at the top of their shopping lists in one hand, and a clenched fist for fighting on the other. It was ugly at the worst of times and beautiful at the best of it. You might be laughing wherever you are. You didn’t want it to be like this, for sure. You laugh as though you knew that the joke was on us.
Loving kindness
I’m sure you’ve heard of Murphy’s first law, that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Would it be okay with you if I share the corollaries of the law, the propositions that follow it? It goes a little something like this: “anything that can go wrong will go wrong” is followed by the proposition that “nothing is as easy as it looks”; that’s followed by “everything takes longer than you think”; and “if there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.”
And it continues: “if you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop”; and “left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse”.
And it continues: “whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first”; and “every solution breeds new problems”; and “it is impossible to make anything fool proof because fools are so ingenious”; and “nature always sides with the hidden flaw”.
Finally, “Mother Nature is a bitch.”
It seems like you were also aware of Murphy’s constant, its encapsulating resonance, that “matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.” It’s like you wanted us to learn this in your odd, morbid way.
Lol.
In the Happy New Year of 2019, I was expecting to evolve into a better version of myself in the next. Then you came along and knocked the wind out of all of us. Looking back, with the death and destruction that you’ve inadvertently created, perhaps you were preparing us to learn about our purpose in life, vulnerability, healing, mental health, rehabilitation, and reconciliation. Patience, loving kindness, and empathy were virtues that might, this time, seep in our thick skin and mind. We look forward to 2021. You know the way out.
In loving memory of 2020
An open letter from yours truly
