Why Care About Meeting the Millennium?
- © Michele Toomey, PhD • January 11, 2001

Some people seem to care not at all. "Why care" translates into "Who cares? What's the big deal? It's of no importance to my life." To those who feel this way, I have really nothing to say except that it's a shame you are so disconnected from the relationship we have with time. Ironically, you would not be reading this column, anyway, since you would never have found my site to begin with, because it's too philosophical for your taste.

But to the kindred spirits out there I say, "I care, I care a lot, and I celebrate this meeting with you." To care about meeting the millennium, we must care about existential questions. Time and timelessness, life and death, shared destiny, a relationship with all those who came before us, all those who share this moment now and all those who will come after us. To be alive at a designated millennium marker is a special event. To care about it is a special gift. We are able to meet in spirit and in time. If intimacy is oneness, then we are alive for a millennium moment of oneness with each other and with time. What an awesome event.

I love the thought of this momentous meeting although I haven't actually loved the occurrence itself. It has in many ways been so mundane. My life does not adequately reflect the feeling of wonder and awe that I have inside but in my heart I treasure this cosmic connection. It is a privilege to be alive to greet and meet the millennium. I embrace the idea and celebrate its magnitude even if I am unable to capture it in fact or ritual. Perhaps that is the point. There is no way to do it justice in reality. Rather, just as the millennium itself, it is to be felt and experienced, not seen. It is, after all, a marker of time and cosmic oneness. It has no shape or form or substance. It is the invisible marker of the passage of time and our connection to it. I care deeply about meeting and greeting those of you who also care as we travel together into this new millennium. May we hold hands in our imagination and smile at each other in our hearts.