Looking ahead to 2011

Well, another year has come and gone and we step into the year 2011 with the usual expectations, optimism and a handful of resolutions to be better, more focused, deliberate, healthy and considerate.
That actually sounds a lot like last year to me but you get used to that after a while.
I turned 55 in 2010. I celebrated my thirty-first year as a person who gets paid for writing and my seventeenth as a working author. I haven’t smoked in 28 years. I’ve been a Boston Red Sox fan for 45 years now, a Chicago Blackhawks fan for 46 and aware of how much I love the land for 53. Time passing has an elastic quality eventually and you give up really noticing by my age.
If you count decades I’ve been alive and conscious of it through six of them. I arrived in the mid 1950s, started school in the 1960s, left school in the 1970s, started my career in the 1980s, branched out into being a novelist in the 1990s and continued that through this past decade. The students I workshop with these days only get to read about those decades as history now.
But I’ve lived through incredible history. I’ve been around for the birth of rock’n roll, can actually recall watching the label spin on 45 records of Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and The Coasters. I lived through the break-up of the Beatles and watched a kid named Hendrix change the face of music yet again. Somehow I survived disco, punk, metal, and new-country, rediscovered jazz in my 40s and saw digital downloads replace store bought CDs and albums.
I watched on TV as a president was assassinated, a boxing champ was dethroned for choosing peace, and a man walked on the moon. I saw the end of the mini-skirt, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Apartheid and the Soviet Union. I saw a cartoon become the most watched TV show in history and the television set itself become color, then a flat screen, then high definition and now 3D.
I’ve been around for the evolution of the Telex machine to a fax machine to an email and now a mobile linkup. I’ve watched computers move from two story giants to half inch lap tops. I’ve moved from posting letters to posting tweets and gone from being eyeballed to being Googled. I was taught from the Good Book and ended up on Facebook. I watched technology become the linchpin of the world.
Here at home I watched Canada turn a hundred. I watched her become a world leader in human rights despite the struggles of First Nations people to question that by virtue of their ongoing struggles. I watched an apology in the House of Commons for residential school abuses and a huge payout to survivors of that abuse. I also watched as thousands of our young people graduated from universities and became doctors, lawyers and yes, Indian chiefs.
The Grateful Dead once sang, ‘what a long, strange trip it’s been.’ It has. But it’s also been a wonderful experience. Because these last 55 years have been so rich and full of invention and tremendous human experience that time has been reduced to its common denominator; wonder. You can’t look at our journey without being overwhelmed by our potential as a species. Looking ahead at 2011 gives me hope for an even better future.
Sure there are a lot of naysayers who grouse and complain and worry that we’ve gone too far in the wrong direction to ever straighten our course. There are those who say we’ll never find true justice, equality or community. They say that we’ve ruined the planet and soiled our home forever. They say the way ahead is marred by the trail behind us. I choose to believe otherwise.
For me 2011 represents an opportunity to do something really simple to change the planet. It’s an opportunity to reach out and share more stories with more people. That might sound juvenile and not well thought out but when we do that, when each of us risks being known and allows ourselves to embrace another person or another culture, our whole community becomes bigger and better. We increase ourselves exponentially.
All that we have and all that we are is the story of our time here. Our goal as individuals, communities and nations should be to work together to create the greatest collective story that we can. I believe we can do that. I believe the desire resides in each of us, in each cultural community and now we have a whole new year to practice in. So Happy New Year to everyone, I hope it turns out to be a great story; yours, mine and ours.