Last year I shared with you my practice of keeping a gratefulness spreadsheet. If you haven’t read that post, you can find it here.

This year I still have the same people on top of the list but there are many people added to my grateful list this year. Most of them are people who I don’t know personally. Like all the authors of books I read, podcasts I listened to, late night show hosts that made me laugh at the most outrageous events that happened to us this year but then yet, I want to thank someone else. This year, I want to thank COVID. It hurts me to do it but I imagine thanksgiving and paying gratitude in general is an opportunity for healing. As I am writing this to you, we are still in lockdown in Paris and I hope soon we can all say that we lost a great deal because of the pandemic but we also learned a couple of lessons and we move on.

I thank Covid for bringing more humanity into my relationships: Covid taught me that we are all on the same boat. The problem was no longer the war in the middle east which didn’t concern people living outside the middle east, we were all fighting the same war and for the first time I felt that we are all the same and there is only one humanity.

I thank Covid for the amazing online events: Since the Covid, my inboxes are full of invitations to digital events: virtual dance, yoga, meetups. We could watch the best musicians playing in their living rooms and late night show hosts shooting from their garage and basically coming back to my first point, Covid also brought some humanity into the entertainment world.

I thank Covid for pushing me to learn new skills: It’s embarrassing to say but I didn’t know how to cook before Covid, now I do. It’s never going to be my favorite thing to do so I learned my way, I know how to prepare quick and healthy food. Before the Covid, I started taking mixing classes with a DJ. After the lockdown, I downloaded Ableton and started playing with it. I wrote a post about the similarities between financial modeling and DJing (You can find it here). The similarities are even more pronounced with music production. Recently, when I’m typing formulas in excel and copying it across, I feel like I am composing music on a keyboard.

I thank Covid for helping me not to hide anymore: I’m a perfectionist and I was never ready to make a Youtube video, publish my book or write a blog post. I overcame that, I learned how to ship the work even when it’s not perfect to my eyes and annonce to the world that “I made this”.

I thank Covid for teaching me to stop taking myself too seriously: I can now say I’ve loosened up since Covid. I opened up space in my life for change and playfulness.

We will some day laugh at everything and Covid is also not an exception.

Thank you.

Hedieh