2020 our societal, emotional, and cultural wildfire

20/20 is the most common euphemism for having clear vision. In essence, it means that you see things clearly and as they are supposed to appear.

On New Year’s Eve 2019, we couldn’t have been more blind! Many of our friends were excited about entering the year of 2020. They assumed it would bring us a clear vision of where we were going with a new start that never looked back. Many of us thought we’d meet our goals head on. That winter night, there appeared to be a collective positivity about what was ahead.

Little did we know we were all on the brink of not just a great wake up call but also a collective global anxiety attack. 2020 was to become the Wildfire That Burned Certainty, but it will also, I believe, germinate entirely unconsidered possibilities. 2020 did bring a clear vision but it wasn’t of the future; it was a vision of what we’ve been ignoring. The year 2020 has magnified the cracks and has collapsed the illusion of our safety and false security.

Human beings teeter on what can be a torturous axis because we may be unique among our fellow earthlings in our ability to ponder the infinite while being trapped inside a finite biological suit known as a body.

To cope with our daily existential crisis, we attach to things outside of ourselves. We do our best to make ourselves less vulnerable in order to convince ourselves that we are not as finite as we really are. We may secretly, or at least unconsciously, hope that these attachments will anchor us to existence without ever having to face how fragile we really are or how fragile the systems and things we attach ourselves to are.

We attach and invest ourselves in religions, our favorite sports teams, our political parties, our nationality, our occupations, and anything that appears to extend our identity. We do it all as ways to tell ourselves that we are here, that we matter, and most of all, that we are in control. It’s all illusion (or perhaps delusion) and 2020 by a myriad of means, set a wildfire to all our collective illusions.

If I may I’d like to make a slight yet highly relevant point. In my work with leaders, I often say that dragons are forged in fire, meaning that it often takes the extreme heat of circumstance to burn away the lies we’ve believed about ourselves, our capabilities, or our courage to make a difference. To that end, have you ever heard of serotinous fruits?

Certain plants grow in areas that are subjected to regular wildfires. Their seeds don’t mature like regular seeds but are released only in response to an environmental trigger. The most common and best-studied trigger is fire. These particular seeds mature only when everything around them has burned away.

At the end of 2019, much of Australia was on fire. Those fires were devastating. By March 2020, Black Summer fires burnt almost 19 million hectares, destroyed over 3,000 houses, killed 33 people, and in addition to human fatalities, many millions of animals were killed. However, after the devastation, new life has emerged. Areas that appeared to be completely dead are sprouting new growth that was possible only because of the fires.

2020 was our societal, emotional, and cultural wildfire.

The fire burns away anything extraneous is the fire that also purifies. However, there is nothing pleasant about being in the fire. As such, many lack the courage to withstand the heat that would catalyze their transformation.

All this is why, in my opinion, despite the tragic loss of life, and the massive economic implications the global pandemic and subsequent upheaval has and will continue to exert for, possibly decades to come, the blow to our collective sense of security is far more socially, emotionally, and mentally devastating. All those things that we thought, or at least told ourselves, make us safe and secure were immediately and irrevocably rattled.

The world we knew appears burned, blackened, and dead.

Now the questions for us are:

Is this an end or beginning?

Are we going to be common house plants that perish in the fire, or will we be the seeds of the serotinous fruit?

Now is the time that each of us must choose. Looking back will the fire that was 2020 devastate us and leave us powerless, or has 2020 burned away all certainty in order to purified us?