In 2019, I was fortunate enough to go on a cruise over New Year’s. I remember being in the ship’s main hall exactly as midnight turned, catapulting us into 2020.
I remember blowing into my noisemaker, and it almost hurt my head because of how much I was using that thing. I was oblivious to the torture that would ensue in that notorious year of 2020.
I started as a Year 5 in 2020, I remember walking into the classroom with green fuzzy walls. When the bell chimed, I sat at my assigned seat and was too nervous to look side to side at the other kids in my class. I don’t know why, but that’s not important; what is important is what came next.
It was Term 1 when the first lockdown happened.
It was halfway through the term that we were pulled out of our classes and school altogether, imprisoned in our homes and forced to look at our laptops for anything but fun.
I still remember the online learning we had to do. I remember being on Seesaw doing maths and reading work they assigned us. Not to mention the countless Zoom meetings we did while the whole outside world was quiet. It was kind of poetic when we all emerged from our houses like we had just survived a nuclear bombing.
Seeing the landscape had flourished without us would have been poetic, except for the fact that we were thrown into our houses again. That felt like the end of the world.
Term 3 rolled around, and in the middle of it, we were sent back into our homes. It felt like time had stopped and rewound, keeping us in a loop for what felt like forever. But the world truly survived without us.
With the factories shut down and not pumping pollution into the air, the world stilled. It forgot about us and started to provide for itself before humanity was even there. It must have been good for the humans too, right?
In lockdown a lot of us took time to connect to the quiet place we call nature, since we didn’t really have time to appreciate it in our daily lives. So I guess you could say that the lockdown was good?
Not really. Since the world basically shut down, a lot of people unfortunately lost their jobs because none of us, apart from a select few, could leave our homes. It felt repetitive, every day. It made us look at our devices for longer than usual, so we started to rely more and more on technology.
Many other events happened in the world besides the lockdowns; however, a lot were caused because of them, such as the postponement of the Olympics, or the election of Joe Biden in the US.
I think we all remember 2020 because of the lockdowns. What we didn’t know was that, during them, we were living through history.
Cossar Salesa-Lee, Year 10
