Heald is a retired agricultural communicator who lives in Ottawa.
We enter 2009 with wars raging in the Middle East and Africa, with an economic crisis threatening world-wide depression, with famine and hunger stalking many poor countries, with a huge gap between the obscenely rich and the middle class and another between the middle class and the obscenely poor.
For an optimist, a problem is simply an opportunity to bring about change and find a solution.
Thus the opportunities for 2009 are seemingly endless.
Could 2009 be the year that some of these intransigent problems are turned into success stories?
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We started this new third millennium with the hope that the world would make progress in eliminating some of those chestnuts and solidify sound international relations.
The first decade has so far failed to justify that hope. But it is never too late to begin.
The young baby boomers of the 1960s and 1970s preached a philosophy of “love not hate, make peace not war.”
It didn’t materialize for the same reason that the millennium goals have not been realized – human nature.
Change in the world won’t come until, as individuals, we live the change that we want for others.
The enmity between Jew and Arab may seem like a chasm too deep and wide to be bridged.
But who in 1945 ever believed that France and Germany could become friends and colleagues in the goal to build a united Europe?
It was personal change and heartfelt forgiveness among individuals in many European countries that healed centuries of bitterness and laid the foundation for the European Miracle.
There are people around the world committed to bringing solutions to world problems – people committed to living the change they want to see in the world. They are people who don’t see problems; they see opportunities for change.
The big world problems are merely an accumulation of small individual problems, each of which can be solved by individual personal change.
Anyone can join the process who is willing to accept the honesty, humility and compassion to change themselves.
What better time to start than in the first month of the last year of the first decade of the new millennium?
