Last year wasn't the greatest.
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It started off with swathes of the country burning from bushfires and then we didn't even get a chance to catch our breath before COVID-19 took hold.
Some of us had to deal with the loss of a loved one, while others had to deal with lockdowns, job losses, working from home, wearing masks, endless sanitising of hands and checking into every place we entered.
But together, we pulling through it. And even when some areas of NSW had to go back to restrictions this weekend, people generally did the right thing.
While many would like to forget bushfires and COVID, Hugh Mackay reckons that would be a huge mistake.
The social psychologist and author of 30 books thinks there are some valuable lessons to be learned from the ugly year of 2020.
The main one is the kindness people showed to each other. The connections made in neighbourhoods, bears in the window (remember those?), going shopping for senior citizens who couldn't get out in the hordes fighting for toilet paper and a hundred other things we did to help each other.
"All the things that show there was a substratum of goodwill, kindness, mutual respect and willingness to make personal sacrifices for the common good which came out dramatically spectacularly in 2020," Mackay said.
It's a theme that is the subject of his new book The Kindness Revolution. He admits that calling for a revolution suggests that it hasn't happened yet, but he pledges to "keep making a noise about it".
"What I'm saying is we've had a crisis don't waste it, let's see if we can turn the crisis into a revolution," he says.
"Really the argument of the book is 'wouldn't it be pathetic if we learnt all those lessons and then just let them go?'. So what I'm saying is because people were generally very proud of the way Australia managed all of that, why can't we take those lessons, absorb them and apply them more generally as in a person?
"In that way, making kindness our default position. That's humans at their best, humans at their most human in fact."
Whether we can do that or not will be tricky. Humans being what we are, once a crisis is over, we tend to try and go back to the status quo. Back to the way things were before we had to deal with that crisis.
"That's the challenge - are we going to just let it go and say 'isn't it terrific it's over' and go back to our rather individualistic self-centred ways, or are you going to say 'that was bringing out the best for us, we shouldn't let that go'?
And he reckons he can see the signs that some people are considering a different way of living - all because of the now-common phrase "the new normal".
"There's all this talk about "the new normal" which I think is really encouraging because with the emphasis on the new it's saying we don't want to go back," he says.
"People have been living in a different way for the last 12 months. A less stressful kind of life, a simpler kind of life, paying more attention to personal relationships and neighbourhood connections."