Roll With It, Baby – an Alternative Theme Song for 2020
As we come to the end of a difficult year, I’ve come up with a new theme song for 2020, and it’s not what you might expect. It’s not the usual song of gloom and doom, or a snide cynical song, making a joke of how everything sucks this year.
It’s the song, “Roll With It, Baby” by Steve Winwood. A song that essentially tells us, “Deal with it.”
That sounds harsh. It’s not meant to be. And I certainly am not ignoring the hard problems that so many of us have faced in 2020, especially the many loved ones we have lost this year due to the Coronavirus.
But last January, before all of this trouble came, I received a word from God. A single word like I have received from him each year, giving me a concept to focus on and expect to learn from throughout the year ahead. The word for 2020 was “pivot”. It meant to make small, simple adjustments in life to overcome difficulties. Both old problems that have plagued us for years, and also new problems, adapting to obstacles as they come up.
Well, they came up. 2020 was a bad year. The Coronavirus pandemic. Horrible instances of racial violence. Several celebrity and athlete deaths. Jobs and businesses lost because of the virus shutdown. Endless hostility online and in the streets over the election and its outcome. And as a result, jokes and memes abound that paint the year 2020 as a time when everything that was once good became horrifyingly bad.
When life it too much
Roll with it, baby.
Don’t stop and lose your touch.
Roll with it, baby.
Hard times knocking on your door.
I’ll tell them you ain’t there no more.
Get on through it.
Roll with it, baby.
At the same time, we’ve had bad years and bad times before. In fact, for some families like mine, 2020 was like a sequel to every previous year, from 2013-2019, but with more special effects. Seven years ago, we lost our home, and we’ve lost a few real estate closings on houses we tried to secure since then. Meanwhile, I have lost several jobs under different circumstances, and we’ve lost family, friends, and reputation over misunderstandings and disagreements that we couldn’t resolve.
For the past four years, I’ve done Uber driving to help make ends meet, staying out until about 3am every Friday and Saturday night. After a car accident in January that I couldn’t afford to fix, I couldn’t even make Uber drive again until May, relying solely on a lesser income from DoorDash, which never worked as well for me. We’ve also dealt with ongoing, extreme difficulties that are too personal to share, which have hindered all of our progress.
Finally, this past June, my older brother was taken from us suddenly, when he was shot and killed a few months before his 50th birthday.
Sound familiar? Sound like what some of us have experienced in 2020, but without all the memes?
When this world turns its back on you
Hang in and do that sweet thing you do.
I believe God gave me that word “pivot” to prepare me and others for what was coming. The Coronavirus was still a few months away from causing massive shutdowns and deaths in our country. For us, it came out of nowhere. But God was not surprised. He was telling us to prepare ahead of time. To get ready to adapt.
Nineteen years ago, the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center shocked America. Our country had never experienced such a sense of fear and vulnerability within our borders. Yet to people in other countries, who regularly saw bombs falling in close proximity to their homes, such an attack was nothing new. Over time, our country adapted to a new normal, with heightened security at airports, and later at schools, after a series of tragic shootings.
In the same way, racial violence in this country is not new to those who experience it as a way of life. It was simply not witnessed by as many people until phone recordings, showing incidents of racial injustice, were shared on a widespread basis this year.
We have also experienced tragic deaths of celebrities in recent years before 2020, including Prince, Carrie Fisher, Billy Graham, Alan Rickman, Robin Williams, Muhammad Ali, John Glenn, Tom Petty, Mary Tyler Moore, Stan Lee, Aretha Franklin, Stephen Hawking, Juice WRLD, Cameron Boyce, and many others. We have suffered through frightening diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, SARS, the swine flu, and the Ebola virus.
We have been here before, dealing with one tragedy after another. However, when we are struck by several of these events at the same time, we feel as though there’s no hope of finding peace again. And for some of us, like it has been for my family, that peace might be a long time in coming.
Now there’ll be a day
You’ll get there, baby.
You’ll hear the music play.
You’ll dance, baby.
You’ll leave bad times way behind.
Nothing but good times on your mind.
You can do it.
Roll with it, baby.
So what do we do in the meantime? We can moan and groan about our difficulties, finding others to support and sympathize with our misery. We can make cynical jokes and blame all of our problems on a single year, or government, or company, or group of people. Or we can adapt. We can find new ways to handle old and new problems. We can change our way of thinking. We can “pivot”, using the word God gave me at the start of the year. It’s the same word that a number of CEO’s used months later, as they defined their plans for adjusting to the many new challenges their companies faced.
We can roll with it.
People think you’re down and out.
You show them what it’s all about.
You can make it.
Roll with it, baby.
2020 was a difficult year. As we near its end, what have we learned to help us face upcoming challenges? Have we grown cynical and bitter? Have we given up all hope of recovery or future happiness? Or have we discovered that, in any dark situation, we can still hope, still fight, still pray, still love, still persevere?
Still live.
Every crisis we face gives us the opportunity to adapt. To find new ways to survive and hope. We can give up on our lives and our joy, becoming another casualty of the year’s tragedies, or we can keep moving forward. When all of the danger and injustice and arguments have ended, we can view life as one giant, surmountable crisis, or we can continue to search for new solutions, new relationships, and new opportunities.
We don’t have to wait for a new year to arrive before we embrace a new life. We don’t need to be defeated by the genuine hardships we faced, and will continue to face, throughout our lives.
Roll with it.
And keep believing.
#2020 #coronavirus #stevewinwood #rollwithit
