I am making peace with leaving my to-do list undone, and this will be my final blog post for 2020.

The year is ending with uncertainty—a COVID-19 outbreak across Sydney is restricting celebrations and, in my immediate family, the last day of school ended with an epileptic seizure and an ambulance trip to hospital. My daughter is fine now (and even ventured into the surf yesterday) but it seemed a fitting end to a difficult year.

January 2020 will be remembered in Australia for the bushfires. That holiday feeling—certain smells that signal summer, blue skies, a loosening of the shoulders and release from responsibilities—remained elusive. In February, we sought distraction from natural disasters, an emerging virus, university change management and a tree-felling storm that left us without power for several days.

In March, I started a new job in academic development. The beginning of the university semester was marked by an empty campus as Sydney entered lockdown. In April, we continued to work, school and holiday from home. By May, we’d got the hang of teaching, researching and entertaining via Zoom.

In June, we enjoyed the little things: conversations, food, being outdoors and books. I returned to campus a day or two a week in July, and celebrated the “goopy mess” of feelings with Nina Pick’s poem ‘School of Embodied Poetics’. I walked the campus in August.

I wrote fewer blog posts in 2020 than in previous years but, thanks to enrolment in a Master of Creative Writing course, practised more creative writing. In October, I oriented my reflections toward hope in a context of political change. As always, reading offered solace but was at a slower pace than previous years.

The year ends with now-familiar feelings from the emotions wheel: fragility and helplessness. But we are also finding ways to be peaceful, playful and excited. The Christmas tree went up early. We are enjoying the illusion of control enabled by the board game Pandemic. We spent yesterday at the beach. Our ears are still ringing—the cicadas are very noisy this year—and we were awed by Pete Rush’s large driftwood wolf artwork:

We have much to look forward to: presents, swimming, cake and (of course) books. My favourite reads this year included fiction—Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss— and non-fiction—Tegan Bennett Daylight’s The Details: On Love, Death and Reading, Tara Westover’s Educated and Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow. I hope to add others to the list before the year’s end. Later today, I will start Sophie Mackintosh’s dystopian Blue Ticket. The epigraph is an extract from a poem by Lorine Niedecker:

Fog-thick morning —
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
    my clarity
with me.

Thank you for reading The Slow Academic this year. I hope your final days of 2020 are peaceful, and that 2021 brings good tidings.