I remember last year when we started putting up our Christmas Tree sometime in December 2019. Quite late than our usual, but due to busy schedules and more blogging activities, it has been put off until few days before Christmas. Funny however, we were able to put it down only after Valentines day this year 2020.
Then the unexpected happened – COVID 19 pandemic affected the whole world in a scale that no one ever imagined. Everything stood still from March to middle of the third quarter of 2020. That’s around six months of silence… on the streets and airport runways, and in malls and other public and tourist places. Most restaurants are only open for takeaways and deliveries. Other essential establishments like pharmacies, groceries, and hospitals were allowed to open with strict safety measures. Schools and offices are closed, many workers have turned to work-from-home mode, while students attended classes online.
It was unprecedented. We never imagined this to happen in our generation.
Worst is… it has affected a lot of businesses, causing mass layoffs and even shop closures. It made travel difficult causing separation of family members… more workers unable to travel back to their work or home country. There were millions of people affected by the pandemic: millions got sick, while hundreds of thousands died worldwide.
And then, as it slowed down towards the third quarter of 2020, things started to move… but not back to where it was before. There was a “new normal”. Wearing mask is required, social distancing is a must, strict precautionary measures are observed everywhere and hefty fines are imposed to those who will violate.
Then “BER” months came and many people who refused to be downed by fear and uncertainties decided to turn on the light of hope, started decorating their homes with festive ornaments, and their hearts with great expectation – try to rebuild their lives and move on.
We’ve lost so much in those months of chaos and panic but we’re very hopeful that the pandemic will totally end soon. We may have planned a lot of things for 2020 which was put on hold because of the pandemic, but a lot of us are still thankful we have survived this shocking part of our history.
May we learn and realize many things out of this pandemic for we know it happened for a reason… and that reason is to put us back to the right track: warring countries stopped fighting, they say nature was healing, people went back to the basic of keeping themselves clean, while many have started a healthy lifestyle.
It was a sort of RESET. And hopefully, it will be a start of something new, something fresh… like leaves after the rain.
