1.

Against the backdrop of the global Coronavirus pandemic, the events of 2020 brought new challenges no one was prepared for, changing the way we live and how we connect with each other. To many, 2020 will be the year when everything changed. Rising tensions, economic breakdown, spread of a novel virus, lockdowns, devastating blasts, job losses, stock market crash, haircuts, protests, remote working, unprecedented presidential elections, wildfires and probably many more. To many the year in review is to say the least a pill hard to swallow and to many there is no reason to believe that this situation will end soon. Few will recall the year just ending with anything close to fondness. But it will surely be recalled with no small measure of pride.

2.

As we look back to this year’s highlights, it is inevitable to think about how events have revealed that some things can be done differently. The lessons learned are simple yet determining and maybe life changing. I realized that you don’t have to spend hours in a plane or in a car to hold a successful meeting, that physical boundaries are no longer valid excuses for missing many useless and unnecessary meetings, that you could reduce your monthly expenditures without drastically compromising quality of life, that in light of the available technologies, online teaching in most cases is not yet ready to replace physical teaching and that social interaction should be about social interaction. Will our ability to adapt overcome? eventually we will be certain that nothing has changed and things are back to normal; in reality many things have and the difficult part will probably be to accept those changes and embrace them.