The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of emotions. (Understatement of at least the last 18 months methinks…)

Some of the news headlines have included the disappearance and, then sadly, discovery of the body of Sarah Everard; protests about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill; the 1 year anniversary of the country going into lockdown as well as the tragic milestone of 150,000 UK deaths due to Covid-19.

Casting our eyes back to a year ago – when many of us were leaving our offices and beginning to work from home (before a certain PM told us officially to) – we were joking about returning to the office before the end of the year ( honourable mention to Booms who did say we’d be back in 2021 at the time…)

Since then we’ve been in a curious state of Groundhog Day, with a seemingly never-ending carousel in-and-out of lockdown, along with a game of pick-your-favourite political scandal of the month. The sobering backdrop to all of this, however, is the number of Covid-19 deaths – leaving a grief-tinged edge to most conversations had this past year.

As well as the previously mentioned events, there’s been many more, some are listed below:
– the death of George Floyd (and the commencement of the Derek Chauvin trial)
– Black Lives Matter protests across the world
– the ‘topppling’ of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol
– the deaths of Chadwick Boseman, Little Richard, Van Halen and many more actors/musicians/celebrities
– the Beirut port explosion
– Donald Trump ordering protestors to be teargassed for a photo op outside a church
– the US presidential election
– Captain Tom walking laps of his garden to raise money for the NHS.

And depending on who you talk to these might not even make the list of memorable events from 2020…

You’ll notice most of these events happened outside of the UK, but the shockwaves from all these events reverberated worldwide. Whether they managed to resonate with people, however, is a different matter.

Empathy – a word that when I was younger I thought everyone had in abundance (ahh naivety!) but as I’ve grown older (I’m aware I’m not exactly old here…) have come to understand that this seems to be the one personality trait that honestly everyone could do with more of.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty sure I could draw a circle around the people who were very quick to exclaim that “All Lives Matter” during the BLM protests last year and also, after the tragic Sarah Everard news, that it was “Not All Men”. Something that seems to be more and more prevalent over the last few years is the lack of empathy expressed by many. One thing that’s particularly struck me over the last few months is having conversations and debates with others and being amazed at the lack of care/belief/understanding of people if something has not happened to them personally.

Is this a wider reflection of society, or of the political landscape? Or has the pandemic seen people retreat into themselves as they’re grappling to deal with their own issues? Whatever it is, it feels like the scales have tipped too far in one direction and the requisite ‘balancing out’ is yet to still happen.

To me, empathy is like a muscle, that must be exercised, otherwise atrophy occurs. And at a stage where the world is slowly starting to open up again – what’s stopping each and every one of us, looking at ourselves, stripping away the bullshit and asking if we’ve lost the ability to relate to people. If we have, how do we change that? And if we think we haven’t, there’s always time to double check and do better. How well can we understand other peoples’ doubts, fears, and concerns, even if what troubles them doesn’t personally affect us?

After the year we’ve had, the optimist in me believes that more people have worked on self-awareness and growth, but let’s see how we both individually and collectively, display empathy in the coming months and years.