One moment amongst many

The first day of the new year. Blind­ing sun­light. Not a cloud in the sky. Frost cov­ers everything. I step out­side, walk­ing along deser­ted streets, breath hanging in the air, my coat and scarf pulled tightly around me. I love these extremes of weather — sun and cold. It’s going to be another year of extremes, I can feel it. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I pass only one per­son dur­ing my walk — an old man tak­ing his dog for an early morn­ing stroll. He wishes me a happy new year. I respond with the same greet­ing, but my words are muffled by the scarf cov­er­ing my mouth. As I turn back towards home, my mobile phone beeps into life. A new year greet­ing sent from a dif­fer­ent time zone, halfway across the world. I love communication.

For a moment, the planet feels like its paus­ing — rub­bing the sleep out of its eyes and recov­er­ing from the last vestiges of the fest­ive hangover, before leap­ing once more into the daily whirl.

While the year 2002 may not have the same monu­mental sig­ni­fic­ance as 1999, 2000 or 2001, it’s now an ines­cap­able fact that we’re liv­ing in the future we used to see pre­dicted in books or on tele­vi­sion. In 1999, we feared the mil­len­nium. In 2000 and 2001, it seemed almost dif­fi­cult to com­pre­hend that we were actu­ally here. Now we’re liv­ing it, and there’s no going back. Each day, we move a little fur­ther into a future that was only the stuff of dreams in our youth. The 21st cen­tury. A new mil­len­nium. A whole new world. The pos­sib­il­it­ies are endless.