We all love to hate 2020. 

And it’s so easy to. It’s the intangible face of all the challenges we have faced this year.

Yet it’s unfair to pin the blame on the year alone. 

For me, the beginning of 2020 symbolized renewed dreams and hopes for a better year than 2019. But only a couple months into the year, these hopes and dreams started to crumble. 

I blamed 2020. 

But I was doing nothing to recognize the underlying problems. We cannot fight our problems if we don’t even realize what they are. 

In times where these problems are tearing us apart, we need to come together (not physically of course) to make these upcoming years better than the last ones.

Our problems are not going to magically disappear once the clock hits midnight on December 31. For all we know, they could continue well into the future.

We do not know what will happen in the future, only what has happened in the past. We can use that knowledge advantageously so we don’t repeat our past mistakes. 

At the end of the day, we need to brush aside our frustration and work to solve these problems. 

Because 2020, if anything, has been a year of change.  

Some of these changes have undoubtedly been hard and painful. Some are out of our hands. 

But we are all human. We need to recognize we cannot control all aspects of our life no matter what year it is and that’s okay.  More importantly, we need to recognize while we may not be able to control these aspects of our life, we can control our reactions to them.

So what can we change?

We can work towards a better future by staying positive, staying realistic and staying connected. Instead of resenting 2020, we can choose to spread kindness and knowledge. 

We can see 2020 for what it is rather than what it could and should have been. And we can enter 2021 with the renewed hope and energy to solve our problems. 

Together.