It was the year we couldn’t wait to see end, even though most of my siblings and friends and I are so deeply into middle age that we’re not sure we can call it that anymore. We’re supposed to savor time, at this stage of life, not wish it away.

But this was 2020, the year of Trump. Of COVID-19. Of a nearly recalled election. Of George Floyd getting murdered and Twin Cities businesses getting burned. Of debates about policing as armed car-jackers were targeting and terrorizing women. Of we white people talking earnestly among ourselves about privilege and our overdue awakening to racial inequities. A year when food lines, tent encampments and rising unemployment brought those inequities to public consciousness and squarely to our doors.

“What will you miss about 2020?” someone asked me on (of course) a Zoom call just as the year was about to turn. “Is there anything you’ll want to take with you?”

My facility for thinking on my feet failed me (“COVID brain”). I couldn’t come up with an answer. And so, as experience has taught me, I turned to the wisdom of trusted friends. Since we’re all going to be masked and socially distanced for a while, their insights can apply equally to 2021.

1. Isolation can also yield peace

“Everyone’s narrative is so negative with COVID,” one friend told me. Instead, consider how working from home, enforced isolation from family and friends, watching movies on Netflix and concerts on our computers have “slowed things down,” he pointed out. During a recent medical appointment, a nurse told him she had gone sledding with her daughter, that COVID restrictions helped her be a more present mom. “We’re not rushing,” she explained.

More time for family was a theme of my friends’ responses. “One thing I will miss when it is all over is time with my kids,” said a member of my weekly women’s group. “I would not want this to go on forever — it would not be good for any of us. But I am very aware that I will never spend this much time with them again.”

Stay-at-home orders “brought a forced simplicity due to isolation,” said a woman who was widowed last year. Another woman, mother to 4- and 5-year-old girls, has enjoyed being released from the pressure “to do-do-do: swimming lessons, gymnastics, dance, soccer, birthday parties, church.”

My most culturally connected friend filled the empty space with reading. “I will miss the luxury of being able to spend time with authors I love and ones I’ve just met,” he said. “I have never read so many books in one year in my entire life!”

Dogs and being outside in nature are even more important than I had thought (and I had already thought they were very important).

Northfield, Minnesota, volunteer and civic activist

2. You get to reframe your own world

A woman who describes herself as an “extreme introvert” would like the less chaotic version of Christmas 2020 to continue. “There was so much less commercial onslaught,” she explained. “I didn’t go to stores with cheesy music, nasty people and buy-buy-buy messages, did not have to navigate the food and drink and noise at parties, and could just be with my little family.” This year’s downsized Christmas reminded her of Chanukah, celebrated by her husband’s side of the family.

The “low-key social life” that comes with COVID restrictions were a blessing to a friend who gave up alcohol more than a year ago after some months of struggling to stay sober. “No pressure to fit in and no drinks to turn down,” she said. “Instead of feeling left out for not being invited to the bar or the club for drinks, I feel like everybody else.”

One woman described “an emotional flash of thankfulness” every time her furnace clicks on. It reminds her of the creature comforts she can enjoy while she cocoons. “I hope I can keep that visceral association with that sound,” she said.

As for me: Aside from running shoes and Smartwool gloves, I haven’t updated my wardrobe in nearly a year. Dresses and dress pants gather dust in the closet. I maintain a skincare routine but rarely wear makeup. I am now so accustomed to dressing for warmth and movement first that I can’t imagine reverting to dressing for professional appearance, for someone else’s notion of what women are supposed to wear. I want that liberation to continue.

I’m feeling connected to the world in a scary but important way.

Minneapolis writer, mother and naturalist

3. Getting rested but staying woke

One friend answered my email query on January 6, the afternoon of the armed insurrection — the revolting revolt — at the U.S. Capitol. “We’re so ready to move on from 2020 that it would be easy to leave behind what we can learn,” she said.

Here are her lessons:

• “What I do impacts others and they impact me. COVID has brought that message home. Who knew as simple an action as wearing a mask could literally save someone’s life? Or livelihood?”
• “I’ve learned that a significant part of the population sees the world very differently than I do,” said this woman who, like me, was raised in a white, middle-class neighborhood with quiet streets and good schools and assumed safety. “It’s more than having differing political persuasions or religious beliefs. They are working with a different fact set and underlying assumptions about the nature of our society.”

Another woman, a former politician who remains civically engaged, said that George Floyd’s “public, brutal, coldly cruel and unnecessary” killing makes her want to work harder for civil rights in 2021.

My strongest memories from 2020 relate to the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on May 25: seeing billowing smoke from a torched Walgreen’s less than a mile from my house during the civil unrest, walking through the Floyd memorial at 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis on my birthday, biking past the destruction on East Lake Street in Minneapolis and the Midway business district of St. Paul, alerting neighbors to wheel out their hoses and put their garbage bins away after a Speedway in my neighborhood got firebombed.

I finished a book in December about historic and contemporary racism in Minnesota, my home state, the place I have always lauded as progressive. I’ve been donating more money to more diverse causes, watching as the neighborhoods around me reboot and rebuild.

“What I want to take with me is the awareness of how the year demonstrated both the fragility and the resilience of human beings,” a friend said. For me, 2020 threatened to upend everything I once believed in. I guess that’s how a more enlightened perspective starts.