WITH days before the New Year, it is time to look at what is up for us in 2021. Some friends asked me what would be my take on the coming year while looking at this time of pandemic as the reference point of possibilities in the next year.
I agree that it would be hard to think and expect too much on what the coming year can offer. As we’ve experienced it at present, we are still into the wave of the pandemic. Now we are preparing to experience the mutation of the coronavirus, which is now noted in many countries particularly in Europe.
It is good the president knew our government should react preemptively on this matter and not to wait for it to come in the Philippines like when we’ve recorded the first case of Covid-19 in the country.
Looking at what happened in this year, we seem to have slowly ushered ourselves into 2020, with nothing significant other than our struggle as a country and people with coronavirus.
Specifically, the events that led to the closing of the year revolve around our country’s handling of the pandemic. The good news is that, in the span of time that we struggled to fight the Covid-19, we’ve learned to manage it including our processes of bringing in LSIs or locally stranded individuals and ROFs or returning overseas Filipinos. Our government is responding to situations that could help our people not to be infected and be free from confinements or deaths.
Another bad news would be that in our state today, we are not yet off the hook. Every day of our lives is a struggle for survival with just having a “hope” that we will not have a chance encounter with the virus.
As I said, we cannot expect more of what the new year can offer. Our lives could still be moving around this pandemic. But individuals do have a choice. They can act normally, just as we want from our people to prevent mental illness, or they can accept the reality that while there is no vaccine, we cannot take the risk into ourselves and our family.
Our reference point should be the breakthrough in medical science, particularly on the vaccines that soon could reach us in the Philippines. The sooner we can have the vaccines; the sooner we can also begin restarting our lives.
I believe we’ll remain in a standstill status until we can have the vaccine for our people. But along the way in 2021, there are efforts that would attempt to restore the normalcy in our lives and activities. Yet it could add fuel to the fire in case we will not have the right solution to the problem. I hope we are learning lessons from the many “false solutions” that we have experienced in the past many months.
We can simply reserve our energies for some useful matters that would come when there is a go signal from our government. That is why our government plays a vital role in all of these uncertainties.
On a personal note, the year 2020 created a change in my professional life. I shifted into a new career path after serving the government for the past 20 years. I still have nothing to ask from somebody Divine who led me as to where I am today. After all, it is about how we look at things and the reasons for our existence. Remember, all this will soon vanish like smoke.
In 2021, we can try to live with our rational mindset and right attitude that could remind people of who we really are in person.
Happy New Year to all!