Dawn Of A Decade

Maybe I haven’t been paying close enough attention, but I haven’t heard a great deal being made of the coming New Year. (Maybe we’re just sooo ready to be rid of this current one!) Still, when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, we will all unhesitatingly march into the second decade of the new century.

A new year, marked by the replacement of two digits this year instead of just one. 2010... Two-thousand-ten… Twenty-ten... It’s various iterations seem to roll off the tongue more easily than its older brothers. Maybe that bodes well for a continuing improvement in the overall state of things.

And what a difference a decade makes! I clearly remember the anguish and anxiety that marked the march into the new millennium ten years ago. The “Y2K” programming bug was threatening to undermine everything that was connected to, operated with, or controlled by a computer. I recall countless hours devoted to the “what if” scenarios of the supposed threat. And — of course — just over a year-and-a-half later, the horrific attacks of 9/11 provided a much more realistic and palpable and lasting fear.

What if the amount of time and effort put into preparing for the Y2K bug had gone into awareness and prevention of terrorist activities against our homeland? Would we have been able to blunt the work of the masterminds of that terrible attack, saving thousands of lives? And what if the frenzied work currently underway in Washington is an equivalent effort in an equally wrong direction? What crises might be awaiting us next year… or the year after that… for which we’re not prepared?

Ah, but look what I’ve done. I’ve gone and slipped into “what if” mode. I’ve taken something that happened in the past and tried to put it into reality for the here and now, and for the future. It’s a poisonous exercise, and one that I sometimes have to counsel my Buyers and Sellers through during a real estate transaction. Twice in 2009 I had transactions fall apart because Buyers “what-iffed” themselves into a frenzy over what was really nothing. Like Y2K, the focus on the imagined outcome took away from what was really there. It resulted in weeks of wasted effort on everyone’s part.

So instead of “what if,” let’s focus on “what will be.” Perhaps that’s why imagery of New Year’s often shows the gnarled old man handing off the hourglass of time to the fresh, young baby. Because what we know from our past — what we’ve learned through our experience — is for the benefit… not the detriment… of what’s to come in our future.
Happy New Year!

Robert Flinn, REALTOR®
919-698-2040 (Direct Line)
919-402-1242 (Office)
rflinn@fmrealty.com (email)