A blank slate

EDITORIAL

My wife, Helen, keeps a diary. Not in the Adrian Mole, Ann Frank or potential political memoir sense. She has a book of days in which she records appointments, work schedules and other engagements of a similar variety.
As the new year had been born I took the opportunity to flick through her 2012 edition before it had been kitted out with obligations. On each page of the book there were three spaces representing a day in each case. I did not work out the exact mathematics of how many pages there were but suffice it to say there were a lot.
Other than mandatory Bank Holidays or dates of celebration, the pages were clean. The tabula rasa sat in my hands and spoke of a number of things. It was a potential repository of historical fact but also an individual interpretation of the coming 12 months.
Last week I wrote, along with many thousands of others around the world, about the previous year. This week those same thousands have been writing about the coming year. I intend to do the same. Not out of form I would hope, but out of a sense of wonder at just how much time lies ahead of us before we reach this date next year.
I must admit to a certain temporal misalignment since our baby Róisín was born. Although she has reached and passed the five-month mark, I feel as though she is at once a permanent fixture and a brand new feature. The sleepless nights and heightened awareness which come hand in hand with becoming a parent have, as they generally do, combined to rid me of any judgement of what time is or what it means in any tangible sense. So, in this fog, I leafed through page after page of Helen’s diary for the coming year. Three days per page and each one blank. Nothing was written because nothing was certain.
In researching this week’s column I read the work of many people from many different fields and absorbed their thoughts on what 2012 might hold for all of us. Despite the authority of the authors I found no surety and, as I turned the pages of the blank diary, I feel this to be far more of a comfort than a curse. Many of the people I read are extraordinarily knowledgeable in their field of expertise but the fact that, ultimately, none of us know what is going to happen is a very good thing.
This is not a new idea. The curse of the cyclops in ancient Greek myth was that they knew the day of their own death. So it feels, in the midst of gloomy forecasts, like something of a relief that all the pages in the diary are blank. We attempt to organise ourselves temporally and use little books to do it, but it masks the fact that we are helpless in many respects to influence reality on a day-to-day basis. While this is a sweeping statement, it is the impression I have taken from the coverage of the coming year.
Whether it is Ireland’s incarceration in a regime of austerity lasting anything up to decade, depending on which former employee you listen to, or the wider belief that the Euro may collapse under the pressure of the markets, the consensus is that 2012 will not be a good year.
It’s been a real treat to watch some of the footage posted on the RTÉ website to mark 50 years of Irish television. A particular insight can be gained from watching The Women’s Programme.
Aside from the most basic fact of the existence of a programme in 1984 which went by that name, there was also a great insight into the way Irish society has developed over the last 28 years. There was a real joy in seeing how far the society has come on in the years since the original broadcast.
At its greatest, television reflects the society it serves. In posting the highlights from the last 50 years RTÉ has given us a fantastic insight into the way life has changed on the island in the intervening years.
While we read news that, according to the Troika, Ireland will remain under sustained economic pressure in the coming year and into the next, there is some solace in the fact that Ireland is a far more socially evolved place than it was in the past. The choking grip of the Catholic Church is starting to be broken and this along with other developments is something positive in a time of darkness.
Despite dire predictions regarding what is coming in the next 12 months, there is something comforting in looking at the blank diary at this time of the year. Page after page of potential is all that exists at the moment. Certainly in 12 months time some of those pages may be stained with ink denoting dark news but for now they remain blank.
In this there is an opportunity. Whatever will happen this year will happen and as people always do, people will cope. The Troika tells us that welfare cuts and tax rises will be a reality to be contended with in 2012 but these will be contended with.
Despite the best efforts of the politicians, the people will survive the coming year and in many cases make the best of what will be a difficult situation. For now, the pages of the year remain unwritten. The year stretches out before us as blank pages of unwritten history that we ourselves have a certain responsibility to fill in as we wish them to be filled.
Harsh experience in the last few years has shown that the state will no longer be a support so it is up to people to support each other. In times such as those we are living through, this is the only protection on which we can depend.