In August 2020, this story about the Choluteca Bridge in Honduras went viral and made many a LinkedIn profile get their 15 seconds of fame. Funnily enough, the bridge was built in 1996, Hurricane Mitch forced the river to change course in 1998 to completely render the bridge useless from the point of its original purpose. But it took a year-long pandemic in 2020 for people to realize that we had all been building our own Bridges to Nowhere while the river of life dramatically changed course.  Clearly, 2020 is our Hurricane Mitch. And 2021 is the year where we figure out what to do with the Bridge to Nowhere. 

Remember, Lewis Carroll’s iconic ‘Through the Looking Glass’. The cusp between 2020 and 2021 feels like we all need to step through a looking glass of our own, to see our world anew. 

With the advent of work / live / play at home era, the impossibility to plan in advance has erased the concept of chronos (as the ancient Greeks called it) or linear time. And because of that, we looked for our identity in the past. As many experts say, yearning—especially in moments of uncertainty—can be really grounding.  And it is this fusion of past and future that gives us five hacks to norm the storms of 2020 as we step into 2021.