Today is December 21, 2012, and the world will end. Or something like that. Or maybe not.
Since the day I was born and until today, there were over 40 separate dates predicted for apocalyptic events. Maybe it has to do with my birth, who knows… but we survive a few apocalypses every year without knowing about it. Among the things you may have missed were Rapture, the War of Armageddon, the arrival of 16 million space ships (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?), a host of angels (hello, Nicholas Cage), and God arriving to Earth in a flying saucer (I wish I was kidding).
Trust humans to be obsessed with the doom and gloom. It’s like we need to be scared and anxious about something… Yet another end of the world comes and goes. We wake up to yet another day, shrug, and pick another date in our calendar.
One thing is for certain… We survive a few apocalypses every year… But they do not involve flying saucers, or (alas!) Nicholas Cage. We are diagnosed with cancer. A parent dies. A child (or 20)… A marriage ends after five years, ten years, fifty… We wake up to yet another day, but it’s the end of the world, as we know it.
And we have to build a new world. A world that now involves chemotherapy and radiation. A lopsided blessing of mastectomy. A world without your parent who always had all the answers, who always knew what to do. A world where you are single, divorced, widowed.
A less dramatic New Age interpretation of today’s day suggests that it marks the beginning of a new era, the time in which we may undergo a positive transformation. We trudge along. We survive another apocalypse. We wake up to yet another day, and it’s a new world. The world WE built. And that’s awesome…
Being true to my sarcastic-on-a-good day, cynical-on-a-bad-day nature, I’m having few friends over for “last supper” (har-har…). No, the world is not going to end, not in the literal sense. (And if it is, I’m guessing you will not be around to correct me anyway). But if yet another predicted apocalypse gives me an excuse to share a meal with the people I love, I’l take it. Thankfully, the forecasts of doom occur on a regular basis.
Signing off (until the new era),
Solo