Happy Friday, peeps. And happy New Year, everyone! Or everyone on the Gregorian calendar that is. (Wikipedia = time suck.)
To be honest, until I got back online yesterday morning, I hadn’t even registered that today would be the first day of a new decade. But it seems that over the last week, everyone else has been trying out answers, drawing diagrams and making tons of lists. From lists of the most influential people to lists of the most important movies of the decade, we’re engaging in a collective process of taking stock, trying to come to terms with the last decade, what it means for us and for our future. I would prefer if we did this – reviewing and setting goals, personal and societal – all year round. But it doesn’t seem to work that way, so here we are: trying to draw some sort of conclusion from the last ten years.
I don’t usually make predictions. If you had asked me a year ago where I would be now… let’s just say I would have been very wrong (never, ever would have guessed married!). My life has been anything but predictable. And if I can’t make accurate guesses at my own life, which is theoretically within some measure of my own control, how could I begin to guess at anything else?
But this year I’m going to hazard a guess at 2010. Why? Because I just have a gut feeling about it. And I hope that I might be right.
Resilience
I predict that ‘resilience’ will be a defining term of the year, and possibly even the decade, to come.
What is resilience? The New Oxford American Dictionary defines ‘resilient’ as:
adj. (of a substance or object) able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. <SPECIAL USAGE> (of a person or animal) able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.
Take note of that special usage. That’s the one. But add community to the little list. “Of a person, animal, or community.” Add economy. Add culture and society. Add civilization and species.
I’ll probably be writing a lot more about resilience this year, and I hope that I won’t be the only one. In the meantime, here’s wishing everyone a resilient new year, individually, communally, globally. Happy 2010!
