So what did I learn during the year?

The nothing days between Christmas and New Year are a wonderful time for rest and reflection. The end of the calendar year calls us to close up the mental accounts and settle the psychological profit and loss for the previous 360-odd days: to look at what has been achieved but also what has remained undone.

But in 2020 of all years, there was obviously much that we COULDN’T do, no matter how hard we would have tried.

But even when we legally could, I found myself too tired to do so. I went through the year in an almost permanent state of fatigue, reaching the end of each day mentally and physically exhausted.

Some of that was the unexpected mental effort from doing everything digitally, getting ‘Zoomed out’. 

But some was the mental strain of having to deal with the continued uncertainty and fear, and having to handle the difficult emotions of others.

So a more realistic assessment of the year involves asking yourself not what you did, but what you learned. What is it that you will take forward? 

This awful year could actually help us in the long run, like a kind of Resilience Boot Camp.

So below I have listed just some of the things I learnt. I would love to hear from you about what you learned too.

I learned to love my house and what I have. I always appreciated it but I never had enough time: rushing off to work and then only back when late and dark for a quick supper then bed, or at weekends rushing out shopping or riding or to see friends. Whereas now, I had the chance to see the changes of light during the day, to observe the changes of season, to see the different ways that weather played. To observe the squirrels, the magpies and yes, the bloody pigeons. To see the trees across the road from my home office come into glorious life, bake in the summer heat, discolour and then return.

I learned to love my neighbourhood. About fifteen minutes away, there is a forest surrounding an old monastic abbey: the Red Cloister or Rouge Cloître. In earlier years, I would get there maybe once, twice a year. Since the crisis started, I walked there at least once a week and usually more. In the thick of the first lockdown, I was there every night, out for two hours. I explored it with friends and on my own. One evening as I was walking near the lakes around dusk, I heard a rustling and looked up to see two boar coming down to the stream to feed. It was a magical moment. The forest is continually changing, with familiar paths looking different from one week to the next.

Now it is turning winter and I am still exploring it, these days by night twice a week with separate friends, rediscovering the paths that I have walked by months now lit up in the moonlight or light pollution.  In addition to the boar, I have seen chipmunks and squirrels. My evening walks are serenaded by owls.

On Winter Solstice, a friend and I stopped and lit candles on the path, the drizzle ensuring that they would not burn the forest. We danced to a few songs. A young woman came by, walking her two black dogs. My friend said “Do you want to join us?” and she said “Actually, yes…” a total stranger taking a bit of release in a difficult time. In the dark, neither of us could see her face so we have no idea what she looked like. But the three of us danced there and let our cares wash away.

I learned to be a better cook, trying things out for myself – who else? – and learning to taste, to improvise with missing ingredients, to improve. I tried Chinese, Indian, Italian, Belgian, Iranian, and whatever Nigel Slater and Yotam Ottolenghi came up with in The Guardian.  I learned to enjoy my failures. The other day, I cooked a Persian meat stew. It came out looking like a bad case of dog diarrhoea. It tasted delicious. I will never be a brilliant cook, but I matured and started to improvise.

I learned to slow down including on the bike, to take in the nature, especially in that eery quiet of April, when hardly a soul stirred. As I rode through France and Italy, I was regularly passed and I did not care. I am still learning to slow and calm down: to overcome my impatience, but it’s a start.

I learned to appreciate that nature around me and the sounds that are usually masked by traffic. I started to learn how to recognise trees. So far, I am limited to oaks, pines and beech trees but it’s a start.

But I also learned that without humans, something essential is lacking.  I will never forget cycling through the empty centres of Brussels and Leuven with bars and restaurants shuttered.

To my surprise, I learned that I like working in an office, surrounded by noisy humans. I always used to resent the trudge into work and the disruption of colleagues, but now I pine for it. But that office is only right when it is filled with human noise. In the slight relaxation of the rules in summer when we were able to go back into the office again in limited numbers, the only times I enjoyed being back were when I was surrounded by the team. 

I learned to humour my team, and the way that quiet moments of listening and encouragement to a despondent team member one week would often yield results week later when one of them would lift me out of a slough by their positive attitude and enthusiasm for life. When we started to get back to work in late May and they allowed us back 10% at a time, I was so thrilled to be back that I was hardly working for two hours. The member of my team who I had nominated to come in, swept past me, switched on his computer, and calmly told me that yes, he would be happy to talk but maybe at lunchtime or in the afternoon: he had work to do. Dead right and I learned and got down to work.

I learned that I can be strong in the storm but I also learnt to accept my negative emotions and be kind to them. Those early weeks of lockdown felt like going down a dark tunnel with no knowledge of when we would see light again. I woke up with a sense of dread but I learnt to see the positive and get through each day. I learnt to surf the waves of my emotions however irregularly and fiercely they hit.

I learned to accept my limitations. Including my slowness in learning to identify trees. And my poorness at slowing down.

I learned to be less judgmental of others as they surf their own waves and react differently to the fog of uncertainty and misinformation over the virus and vaccines. I learnt that some friends were mighty oaks that toppled in a storm whilst others were delicate flowers bending with each breeze but surviving due to deep roots. I learnt to accept both and do my best for them but also to step back from internal personal struggles that are not my own.

I learned to appreciate my real friends both in person and online. But l also learned that I yearn for the moment when I can see them again face to face with no ‘social distance’.

I learned the importance of touch. When I met up with a friend for my first restaurant meal after the relaxation of lockdown in that all too brief summer, and she hugged me as we left, I nearly fainted. It was my first serious human contact since I had hugged my parents goodbye four months earlier. I hunger for touch.

I learned how extraordinarily lucky I am to have a secure job out of harm’s way while health workers and many, many others put themselves put themselves out there, day after day, week after week, month after month, and business owners and workers see decades of hard work and financial investment washed away.

I learned that there are many quiet heroes. But that there are also many vocal dicks.

I learned to read people by their eyes. I learned that I love noses and mouths.

I learned how few hours we have in a day, how few days we have in a life.

I learned the fierce urgency of now, the importance of seizing the moment like a wild fish in life’s rushing stream.

I started to learn how to write a blog and a piece for LinkedIn. I can still fit all the followers of this site into a large cardboard box. I learned not to care.

I learned that I should have followed the advice to choose a title for my blog that was sufficiently wide and general to allow for wherever I found myself wanting to take the site later. Because otherwise you end up with a post on resilience and life learnings in a site dedicated to comfortable bike touring…

I learned that you have to punctuate your words with pictures because otherwise people get very bored.

I learned that you are still learning every day. Even in early January when you think that you can sum it all up.  Every day.

And I learned that you shouldn’t overthink or over-elaborate a post. Sometimes you should just stop right there and click ‘Publish’.