Way back in 2012 I was working at what I was convinced was my dream first job in the public service. I was miserable and stressed out. My Minister was notoriously awful and the organisation was going through a fractious restructure.

In my particular work misery bubble, one colleague had it particularly bad working for a nightmarish manager. I will never forget the look on his face when he relayed the conversation he’d had with HR, who having listened to his desperate plea to be transferred elsewhere in the organisation, looked him straight in the eye and said “sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel.. is actually a train”.

It’s not super surprising that this bleak memory re-surfaced for me recently. Reaching what you think to be surely the end of a long string of misfortunes only to be told it will, in fact, get worse is peak 2020. But with the benefit of a few additional years of wisdom, I’m finding the words of this unknown HR person to be instructive.

Firstly, as an advocate for rapid public transit, I’m very much into trains.

More broadly, it’s a helpful reminder that the people who tell you it won’t get better are wrong. That they insist on this belief is because they are deeply embedded in the system that we are trying to change, and struggle to imagine how it could be different.

“Wherever you find yourself as 2020 comes to an end - as an unempathetic HR manager, or the most powerful politician in the country with a record breaking mandate - ask yourself, do I have the courage to make the change with the powers available to me?”

Lack of imagination doesn’t mean lack of sense. As an unrepentant peddler of optimism I have a firm belief that many of us would like to live in a community where people have meaningful work for good pay, in organisations that respect them. Even better, these jobs could exist in a society where everyone can live in a warm, dry home, where families are thriving.

It’d be great to be able to swim in our rivers, too.

The scale of challenges that face us in 2021 in our efforts to build this society can feel daunting. Recovering from the social and economic damage of Covid-19, the hangover from four years of a powerful poisonous autocrat, and the omnipresent climate crisis - it’s all there.

But in the vastness of it all, we can also find the ability to imagine an entirely new way of doing things. As Arundhati Roy wrote recently, always on point, “the pandemic is a portal”. Especially for the young people who, it seems to me, found in this absolutely shitter of a year the courage and the motivation to speak up and take action on injustice everywhere.

But some people are just too stuck in what is, to play a role in what’s possible.

So my resolution for 2021 is that if I find myself unable to join the effort to make things better, whatever the reason, I’ll make way for those who can. Given the scale of everything that we’re going through, we do not have the luxury of a) small tweaks to a broken system or b) people with all the power and influence refusing to use it.

And wherever you find yourself as 2020 comes to an end - as an unempathetic HR manager, or the most powerful politician in the country with a record breaking mandate - ask yourself, do I have the courage to make the change with the powers available to me?

And if you don’t, consider doing yourself and everyone else a favour - step aside and let those who are willing, to take the lead.