Calendars were designed for two reasons: To mark the passage of time, and to remind us to carve out time for self-reflection. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

I remember being glad at the way my year started. Tuning out the sounds of debauchery, I woke up to the crisp morning air of January 1, 2020. In the adrenaline rush that followed my run, a voice in my head said, “This will be one of the best years of your life.”

The future will arbitrate that.

But even with everything I know now, I know that there is much to be grateful for. And much to regret.

My gratefulness didn’t translate into action, even as images of desperation were beamed into my living room amid the pandemic. I expressed my outrage over devices on all platforms. In hindsight, my outrage reflected my privilege — the privilege of the keyboard warrior. It is another thing altogether to effect change.

How is one to effect change? I remember asking that question of Arun Maira, former chairman of Boston Consulting Group (India) and former member of the Planning Commission. He gently suggested that I begin by listening to voices unlike mine. It took a while for the import of his advice to sink in. My instinct on hearing narratives that are ideologically opposed to my own is to lash out. When I’ve made the attempt to listen, however, I have been granted access to a perspective that I may otherwise not have encountered.

By way of example, there’s an old gentleman whom I chose to stay away from for a long time because I thought him a bigot. Some chance encounters led us on long walks and over time his narrative tumbled out. Born during colonial rule, Partition tore his family apart and compelled him to move to Bombay from Lahore, a city his heart continues to beat for. The animosity he bears to citizens there is an outcome of the scars his body acquired on the journey here.

It was easy to argue with him. Listening to him in silence was difficult. It is an acquired skill.

That I have the mental muscle to implement change is also obvious now. If someone had told me at the start of the year that I would have to work at the pace I now do, barely stepping out of the home yet finding ways to stay engaged with people and on top of things, I would have laughed them out of the room.

And yet I have managed, as have most others. And working from home has taught us to empathise with those in our homes and our lives that we had lost touch with in our race to get from place to place to place.

In the early days, one of the first things I did was quibble about how demotivating it was not to have access to my workplace and privacy. Until I looked at the kids. How traumatic must it be for them to not be at school and on the playgrounds with their friends, I thought. These are the most impressionable years of their lives. If I’d been asked to give up a whole year at school, I would have keeled over in horror. Each year there was precious. But these kids were compelled, and they rose to the challenge.

I next looked at those in my life a generation older. In the busy-ness of life, I hadn’t noticed — or perhaps hadn’t wanted to acknowledge — how much older and more fragile they had become. That was when the full import of the American writer Philip Roth’s words sunk in: “Old age isn’t a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

In each generation — mine, my parents’ and my children’s — I saw reflections of how wonderfully adaptive and resilient we as a species are.

Our minds and our lives had been scaffolded by rules and routine and yet when, overnight, we were forced to reimagine our world — individually and collectively — we did. Forced to wake up daily to the unpredictability and arbitrariness of a pandemic, we found ways to cope. And deep down, we discovered reserves of equanimity. “This too shall pass” is now an article of faith.

So as 2020 draws to a close, I prefer to dwell on how much we have to be grateful for, and hopeful about. Dwell on ways in which we can reach out to one another more effectively to extend help and hope.

This article was first published in Hindustan Times