This past year has been hard. Really, really hard. Social distancing, everything canceled or closed, sickness, death, some over-worked and some out of work, and let’s not even get started on politics. But there have been bright spots, too. I want to end 2020 and begin 2021 by looking at the positives that came from this past year: the silver linings we found in the midst of a pandemic.

Five Good Things That Happened in 2020

1. We learned what is essential.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,” writes Henry David Thoreau in Walden. In 1845, Thoreau went to live a spartan life in a cabin “to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”