A really new New Year

I suspect that staggering numbers of people are, like me, counting the nanoseconds until 2009 is over. It’s been a curse – and perhaps odd good luck, too – that we’ve all had to live through an unusually difficult and interesting year.

For even though an awful lot has fallen apart or exploded and made us suffer, sometimes terribly, we are beginning to see one another decide to change. And that’s the first, most important step in creatively improving ourselves and our world.

The next is to invent ways of making that change positive and effective. The processes of creativity can be painful and frustrating, as in health-care reform, or astounding and exhilarating, as in the overflow of communications-technology miracles that seems to pour endlessly from the brains of Google and Apple staffers. It almost doesn’t matter which – the prospect of movement is ecstasy after so much stagnation in so many areas of life and society. Better systems and better results will eventually roll out  in a slow, but lasting and satisfying evolution.

Franklin Roosevelt was talking about the Great Depression when he said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”  but his words speak just resonantly to imagination, self-expression and progress.  It takes courage to change what doesn’t work, equal courage to envision and adopt what does.

People of great brain and heart are always quietly at work on the future, even during humanity’s darkest times, but when the rest of us join with them to embrace new ideas and possibilities, our accomplishments become exponential: We bring forth a Renaissance, an Enlightenment,  an Industrial Revolution, a Modern Times.  

We’re standing right now on the upward slope of a vast Creative Age in which instantaneous access to the whole of human knowledge and ideas will produce ingenious creations of deep thought, feeling and useful application in an abundance the Earth has never before witnessed. It won’t  be a breeze, but it will be amazing and stimulating. And, if we aren’t afraid to face the hard work of thinking, of not depending on the familiar and the easy, it will make us and our planet wiser, healthier, more skilled, compassionate, tolerant and prosperous. 

And if those aren’t the ingredients of happiness and love, I don’t know what are. I hope 2010  is the start of it all for everyone.