This post starts a new category on Reflecting Y2K

Dear Friends,

There's been much commentary on what happened and what didn't happen with Y2K. A number of people have asked me what Robert Theobald would have said.

One friend suggested that I might start a rumor that Whoopi Goldberg had channeled Robert and he said "it was hard, but I was able to move around quite quickly without my body and I've mostly been able to keep anything bad from happening."

That rumor makes me smile.

And, I do want to share some of what would had come up if Robert and I had a chance to talk about this.

^^Express Gratitude^^. It is a wonder and a blessing that so few people's lives have been harmed as a result of Y2K failures. It's a futile exercise to take credit or blame for what happened over the last two years as different people and organizations prepared for this in various ways. Each of us needs to reflect on what we've learned - and share it.

^^It's About Resilience^^. We've said all along that Y2K was a clarion call asking each of us to look at resilience at the personal, community and global levels? How balanced are we? How able are we to adapt to change? Do we have the right mix of challenge and serenity to keep our lives in focus? How do we build and enhance our capacity to care for ourselves, each other and the planet?

^^Self Organizing^^. In community after community all around the planet we demonstrated an incredible capacity to self-organize. We moved into relationships with new and old partners and thought about how we might support each other. We have had a wonderful opportunity to develop this skill.

^^Anticipations^^. Hopefully, we've learned to laugh, and lightly hold the perils of self-organizing in anticipation of events of events that have not yet occurred. In systems theory, and in cellular organization, self-organizing occurs in the moment, not in the anticipation of the moment. A lot of time and energy was spent trying to anticipate what would happen around Y2K. Perhaps in the future our attention will be more on building our overall resilience and capacity to deal with whatever emerges.

^^Measurements^^. Perhaps one of the most important reminders from Y2K is that we increasingly don't know how to measure anything of importance. Measurement requires a known standard and base. We're in a period of creation of new standards and bases. I think this is what living with ambiguity is all about! ^^Nothing's Changed^^. Many of us who have worked on Y2K saw it as the "canary in the mine" of our other concerns - destruction of ecosystems, runaway consumption, growing gaps between the rich and the poor, increased stress and decreased quality of life. We got through Y2K, so far. AND, many of our underlying concerns about the directions of industrial growth society remain the same. We need to continue our work to keep things from getting worse, to develop effective alternatives for people, and to evolve a whole shift in consciousness.

^^Nothing's Changed, Except Us^^. Many of us have changed as a result of our work on Y2K. The world seems a bit more, well, global. Separate little project seem less important. Our consciousness of our deep interconnectedness has expanded. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives have shifted. Y2K has been an easel on which many of us have started to draw new pictures of our lives.

Those are a few of the things I think Robert and I would have talked about, and which he might have written about as well.

I move into the year 2000 filled with hope. We have a chance to create new stories about how we live our lives.

Many Blessings,

Bob

Robert L. Stilger, Executive Director Northwest Regional Facilitators

-- Robert L. Stilger (rstilger@nrf.org), January 06, 2000