Time is all we've got: Don't be too thankful 2020 is nearly over

This column is an opinion by Chris William Martin, a former St. John's resident now working as a professor at Algonquin College inOttawa.For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Before the last leaf has fallen from the majestic maples in the park near my house, we can bet that the store shelves will already start to become flooded with Santa and the Claus family, the tacky elves on the shelf and every other piece of holiday miscellanea imaginable.

But as the year 2020 grows closer to a close, another phenomenon will soon flood our everyday view. I am talking about the chorus of voices on social media who will begin to exclaim: "Thank [pick your curse word] 2020 is over!"

In fact, making its viral rounds on the internet now is a spoof trailer for the year 2020. Complete with dramatic montages of wildfires, scornful and relentless politics, murder hornetsand, of course, COVID-19.

It sets us all up to collectively curse the year 2020.

Yetin the chorus of voices thanking their lucky stars that 2020 is almost over there is a nagging problem.

It is always obvious when people blame the death of icons like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Chadwick Boseman, or Eddie Van Halen on the year they died ("Curse you, 2020, for taking someone else from us") that the culprit is not a specific year but actually the most pervasive problem for all of us: time.

Resilience, and knowing the story does not end

2020 is the year my four-year-old started school in Ottawa. She began her journey into learning in full-day junior kindergarten in September.

This year our typical parental concerns were amplified louder than Van Halen's guitars when it came to masks. How can we get her to wear it? To wear it properly? How dangerous will it be for her, for the teachers, for the families?

So along with princess-themed lunch tins, clothing, and colouring books, we also made sure to include Daisy in picking her own masks. Kitty-cat adornments have had the longest lasting popular appeal, if you're wondering.

Every day, I drop her off to school and I watch as she waits in a line with kids who have all been organized into learning pods,all of them wearing adorable masks filled with superheroes or their favourite cartoon characters. These four-year-olds don't complain about the mask and so far, all pessimistic views about the "illogical idea" that kids could wear masks seem to be overblown. They almost seem like they enjoy it.

And why shouldn't they? This is their first year of school!

A little bit of fabric can't stand in the way of life and learning.

But what does this story tell us? It tells us about resilience. For all the kids starting school (throughout all grades, and post-secondary) in these times, the story is of resilience.

Canadian author Neil Pasricha shot to literary fame with his first book, The Book of Awesome, in 2010. But it is his most recent book You are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure, and Live an Intentional Life, that offers us some much-needed advice during these times.

Pasricha talks about how we all could use a lesson in resilience. Though it might sound like a lesson only suited for my junior-kindergartner, resilience, or the idea that we all need to realize that giving in and giving up isn't the answer, for Pastricha, can be thought as adding an ellipsis [that is,]to a sentence rather than a period.

In other words, the story is not over when the times get hard. We find a way to make it work, no matter how much adversity we face.

It really is very human to be resilient. Human resilience is something to behold and should be celebrated. It is what allows for the best of inventions and the most innovative of thinking.

If resilience is what we need, wishing 2020 would be over is the antithesis of resilience.

Time is precious

The philosopher Alain De Botton is one of my favourites. He begins a book about the writer Marcel Proust its title is How Proust Can Change Your Life with a story about a Parisian newspaper and its habit of asking hypothetical questions to famous people of the time.

One time, it posed a hypothetical question that was roughly this: "What would you do if you knew the world was ending by a big cataclysmic event?"

The responses from well-known authors and celebrities of the time poured in. Some remarked that they imagine that most people would either be rushing to churches, to the bedroom, or to tick off some great pleasure off their bucket list.

Another worried that all inhibitions would go out the window and about the possibilities of violence. When Proust weighed in, he wrote, "And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening."

A piece of sociological knowledge that I often share with my students is that it has been shown the best way to start a conversation with someone is over a shared problem. "Some weather we are having, huh?" "That test was really unfair, right?" and so on.

If you approach someone who you are interested in striking up conversation with by discussing shared problems, it opens up a lot more conversation than a quick compliment. In turns out that gossip is quite useful!

The issue that Proust is getting at in the above quote is that we get used to seeing problems as common and unavoidable and that they can become so consuming that we tend to miss the most important quality all of us have: time.

If time is such a hot commodity, why wish it away or be thankful it is over?

Human resilience will allow each of us to realize that the sentence on COVID-19 is not over and that we can make vaccines and therapeutics a possibility.

But a reminder of the preciousness of time is just as important as we enjoy our lives as they are right now for what it is. There is no question we have already won by being here.

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