A year ends, begins and continues

2020 is in its final hours and wow was it ever [insert choice words]. In a Zoom conversation I had this morning with lifelong friends from my university days, I referred to this year as the “whack a mole” year. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “Whac-a-Mole” is a popular arcade game (they dropped the “k” in whack for some reason) in which players try to whack five plastic moles on the top of the head using a soft rubber mallet.  As the game progresses, the fiesty moles pop up more quickly and simultaneously, taunting you to clobber them before they disappear into the machine only to pop up again moments later.

The game was actually invented in Japan 45 years ago (its original name translates as “Mole Buster”) and now is found in different varieties throughout the world, including as “Crazy Frog” here in Thailand. Inspired by the chance mention of the game in that Zoom call this morning, Kai and I decided to head to our neighborhood shopping mall this afternoon to whack away at some frogs, and I must say, it felt really good…

Since its first appearance as a game in 1975, the expression “whack a mole” is used to describe a situation in which problems continue to arise or pop up faster than one is able to cope with them.  Like the spread of COVID-19, for example. Not to make light of a terrible disease, but it’s apparent that COVID-19 is moving around the world and in local communities in waves, and it now reappears in different forms too. Thailand, which had essentially zero local infections for 6 straight months, is now dealing with a surge in local infections when the disease was recently detected among migrant workers at a shrimp market in Samut Sakon, a city southwest of Bangkok. Though still nowhere severe a situation as in my homeland or other countries, the number of cases in just over a week increased the country’s total confirmed cases by over 20% and also brought the country’s single-day high of 576 cases, far surpassing any day when the disease was believed to be at its most dire in April.

And just after the world celebrated the approval and administration of the first vaccines to fight the disease, anxiety and uncertainty reared their ugly heads yet again when variants of COVID-19 were found in the exact same country where the first vaccines were administered. Just like the game, the disease keeps popping up no matter how we try to get rid of it, and as much as we would like 2020 and all of its traumas to be behind us, clearly we will be struggling for some time, and it remains to be seen if we will be able to unplug Whac-a-Mole and Crazy Frog forever.

Though many great and wonderful things happened all over the world this year, 2020 will be chiefly remembered for the pandemic, and most of the words we uttered, wrote and shared this year– coronavirus, lockdown, social distancing, “new normal”, online learning, WFH (work from home)– will be associated with this virus. In fact, Oxford English Dictionary couldn’t even choose just one word for 2020 for their annual Word of the Year, instead opting for “Words of an Unprecedented Year.” And while “unprecedented” might be a word we tend to use a little too often (like “awesome”), this year was certainly unprecedented in many depressing and troubling ways.

But rather than dwell on all of the negative, I hope we can reflect tonight on all the learning and the good that came from this year and that will continue to come in the future. There are many reasons to be grateful, and there are many ways that each of us can be the source of someone’s gratitude. Our individual acts of kindness are in fact what makes the world a better place, even if the world doesn’t know our actions or our names. And while 2020 may always be remembered as the year we loathed and would rather forget, it’s good to remember that every single day we have on this planet is just a continuation of the day before. And every day that you are healthy, no matter what the year or month or day, gives you opportunities to be hopeful, helpful and kind.