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Jersey student Jack Lister reflects on some of the unexpected positives that have come out of one of the strangest and most disruptive years in living memory:
In March, a university friend told me he’d gladly put his clock forward nine months and fast-forward through his second year at Exeter to get back to what was normal.
I see his point. It’s not the roaring twenties I was hoping for as I left my teenage years behind in July. This year’s roaring lion has been replaced by a rabid shape-shifting stray that caught us all off guard.
So, the sooner the mongrel year gets its lethal injection the better, right? Well, let’s not be too hasty here. The start of this new decade hasn’t been what we all expected, and without doubt it’s had its tragedy, its times of despair, heartache and desperation, but how easy is it to lose sight of the positives? When we let this mutt in, back last January, it brought some unexpected positives hidden beneath its mangey matted fur.
Writing the year off as a tragedy seemed to me as an admission of defeat and a bad omen for 2021. In search of something different and as an alternative to burying my head in the sand, I found solace in a variety of positives that appeared to me like the light at the end of a tumultuous tunnel.
Having lived around the city centre of Exeter for most of 2020, admittedly I felt completely oblivious to changes made to our natural world environment. Only through reading national news headlines, it seemed like Britain had finally started to make progressive baby steps towards reversing generational damage.
Pictured: More people have enjoyed the expanded British woodland this year.
As if the British government needed an extra incentive to advertise the post-lockdown ‘staycation’, in July, forestry projects had meant that British woodlands covered as much of the country as they did in the Middle Ages. Potentially providing the British public with the ultimate outdoor arena for the world’s largest game of hide-and-seek.
As a keen traveler, I had viewed this summer as an opportunity to explore the world as far as my measly student savings would allow. To me, the idea of visiting Machu Picchu seemed far-fetched and over-expensive. While clearly the visit didn’t happen in 2020, the Peruvian government have utilised this year by pledging to plant one million trees in the next five years around the historic Machu Picchu site.
I predict that the Peruvian government have paved the way for a fashionable style of environmentally conscious tourism that may just take hold in the 2020s.
Being among the few Jerseymen who had embarked upon a small amount of travel this year, my return to Jersey for the Christmas holidays followed a period of compulsory isolation that had me leading to reflect upon the way this year had panned out for myself.
The phrase ‘progress not perfection’ had instantly sprung to mind. If you then went on to try to summarise changes made to global human rights issues in 2020, an appropriate phrase might also be ‘progress not perfection’. Even as a society, I believe we are too preoccupied with perfection that it can cloud the moments of progress we make.
While you don’t need me to say that 2020 was far from perfect, in March 2020 a sense of hope arrived in the form of a Unesco report showing that gender parity (equal number of boys and girls) in primary and secondary education had been achieved in the world for the first time since 2000. If I had a checklist for all the attributes of a strong society, equality would be towards the very top of my list. My hope is that from the progress made towards striving for equality in 2020 this will help form the cornerstone of a more inclusive tomorrow.
Looking back on my conversation with my university friend in March 2020, if my friend had the ability to have fast-forwarded time to nine months down the line would he have done? I don’t think so. The unexpected positives found in the rabid shape shifting mutt’s mangey matted fur may well have irreversibly transformed aspects of our community for the better.
This year, a renewed meaning of the importance of family time and an opportunity to explore Jersey’s in all its glory through the infamous ‘staycation’, might not have resembled the extravagant roaring lion we expected of 2020, but instead allowed us to pause and take stock of all that really matters.
