Twothousandandnine - year of change

These are my 20 minute thoughts and hopes for the New Year (London, 31st January, 12:06).

2009 will be a year of change, not just because this was the election platform of Barack Obama (in which he hopefully still believes), but because the world had a heart attack in September 2008 and any serious doctor could not advise to simply get back to normal.

Heart attacks are usually a symptom of something, either your body/system gets old or your body/system was working under extreme pressure which it could not withstand.

Let’s assume the world is still in its prime but has been working beyond capacity. What would a doctor do after a heart attack? He would deal with the emergency at hand and get the system working again. This is what happened between September and November 2008. Then the doctor would tell you to take a rest, stop running, stop gambling and stop unnecessary stress. He would tell you to go back to the fundamentals and reevaluate your whole way of life. You will probably do less for a while, spend time with the family and ask yourself what you really want from life. This is what is happening now, the world takes a step back, does less (produces less, hence the recession fears) and starts to reevaluate whether the current way of life can continue.

Following this train of thought, 2009 will be a year of slowing down and changing to a more sustainable way of life: a way of life, less frenetic, more thoughtful and more orientated towards long term sustainability.

For other reasons than outlined below, I decided that 2009 will also be a year of change for me: moving global (to the UN) and South (to Geneva). It will probably be a slower year and a year of reevaluating our personal way of life.

Let’s see next year how the world and the Wilkens-Goldings have managed the year of change.