2021: Waiting for the Happiness Fairy

This past year was a trial. Even if you were in one of the far corners of the earth, it was a trial. Covid has arrived at Antarctica with thirty-six people testing positive at General Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme research station run by the Chilean army. They had been using quarantine measures for people going there, but Covid intruded, anyway.

It sounds like 2021 has hope, but not immediate release. People have lost businesses and homes, recognizable life is now upside down. What can we do for our new year to be better? My advice is to let your breath out. Quit waiting for this to be “over.” As long as you are alive, life is ongoing. A baby begins to feel the pain of cutting teeth shortly after he/she is born. Should they wait until teething is over to show growth and joy? Considering you grow and lose teeth until early teens and then they usually snap braces and elastic bands on, I wouldn’t wait that out. And for 2021, I would not be waiting on some happiness fairy to come and bless us all with an end to Covid and total joy.

I read about a man who was having problems with his teeth and gums. He decided to ask his child, who was cutting new molars, how she handled eating. So, he asked, hoping for a solution. She gave him one.

“You just chew through the pain,” she said.

I love family Thanksgiving and Christmas. I can walk around the house and listen to the laughter and conversation and feel joyful. Record scratch to 2020–none of that happened. Like a children’s song, it was “here a small group, there a small group, everywhere just a small group.” We relearned how to send packages. Then, we learned how to be patient when they arrived seven days late. We learned to order online and how to be patient when packages arrived broken or empty.

What we did not learn, yet, is to get along. Governors wanted mask mandates. So, they did not become a burden to be born, like parking between the lines. They often became a battle ground. But, by then, everything was a battle ground. It is not a matter of bearing up, of doing what is asked whether or not you agree with it, but a reason among reasons to fight. Sometimes I wonder if adults actually were in grammer school.

I went to six elementary schools. Some I liked; some I did not. But I learned that you behave in a certain way, regardless. You walk in the halls and when you are on pavement for recess. You keep your hands to yourself. You keep your opinions to yourself. I thought one of the schools was STUPID, just STUPID! I hated everything about it. We made faces out of coffee cups. I sat and cut eyes out of a magazine and glued them on, then sat back and thought it was stupid. But I smiled when the teacher encouraged our art. We had weekday religious education. I had never had that, before. I’d been in bible class and church since I was born. I thought the story the preacher taught us was lame. I listened politely. (And it wasn’t a difference in affiliation—we were the same in that.) Then came the day when we could not have art class. A teacher in another classroom had turned off her floor fan and tried to stop the blade with her finger. She was off at the hospital and the art teacher was handling her class. Now I had PROOF POSITIVE that the school was stupid! Who puts their finger in a fan!?! I opened my book and read, as that was my instruction. Maybe the school was stupid. Maybe I was right. But I was there and a certain decorum goes with being in a classroom. Many people paid for that privilege. I could not have put myself in a classroom. It takes money. And time. And education on the part of many, many people. And my job was to honor that.

We are, perhaps, in a school that is stupid. But there are things to learn and a way to act. And it is not like many of us have acted. We may need new ways to make a living. We may need to take in relatives that are going through a huge change in plans. We may need to bite our tongues and follow our leaders. You know that lame preacher? He taught me that the cross was not the early Christians’ symbol. It was the fish. If you were under persecution, you could draw a fish in the dirt and another Christian would know what you meant. A non-Christian would not. They could identify one another. When you see a little fish on someone’s car, that’s what it means. And I know that, sixty-one years after it was taught because I folded my hands and kept my peace and learned what was offered.

Whatever 2021 has to teach us, whatever it has to offer, be joyful in greeting it and resolute in managing its pains–maybe we have more to learn than we think.