Find some good in 'bad' years and prepare for what's to come

Earlier this week I read a story about how climate scientists reported that 2007 was a "year of worsts." At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, scientists reported that 2007 was the year of the least sea ice in the Arctic, the fastest retreat of mountain glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the quickest decline of snow in Greenland.

Nothing like climate news to make me want to open a beer and sigh deeply. So I did. The only problem was that I don't really drink beer.

I do sigh particularly loudly, which brought my husband right into the room. "What's the beer for?" Brad asked.

"A year of worsts," I said. I filled him in about the climatic worsts, then found myself listing other bad characteristics of 2007.

I thought of catastrophic wildfires in California. Rising rates of foreclosure. A continuing war in Iraq that has claimed the lives of about 3,900 service members. I remembered a grim story from the Census Bureau about how there has been a sharp increase in never-married twentysomethings. And another survey from the American Psychological Association about how nearly half of Americans think their lives have become more stressful in the past five years alone.

"This year was a bad, bad year," I told Brad as I put my head on the counter. "I hope next year isn't any worse."

I could hear Brad swig from my bottle. Then he snorted. "You have got to be kidding me. This year doesn't even make it into the top 10 worst years of the past hundred. Your problem is that you just don't know your history."

He went over to the bookshelf and started digging around. He plunked "Timelines of World History" onto the countertop and started paging through it. He found plenty of years that must have had Americans feeling much grimmer than they do right now.

"See here, 2007 was not such a bad year," he explained. "It's no 1919. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers died in World War I, did you know that? And what about the flu pandemic at the same time - 675,000 dead in the U.S. and tens of millions dead all over the world?"

He pointed to foreclosures during the Great Depression. Hundreds of thousands dead in World War II. Race riots and assassinations. The oil crisis in 1973. Watergate. 9/11.

"Now those were years to put your head on the countertop," he exclaimed, shutting the book with a snap.

"So what are these years for?" I asked.

Brad leaned in close. "Getting ready."

I didn't like that answer. I didn't like to think of getting ready for a worse year. Nor could I imagine preparing for one that would actually be better. And yet that is exactly what we are supposed to be doing.

These "nothing" years like 2007 are meant for us to shore up the mechanisms that actually sustain people during bad times. I don't mean we are supposed to dwell on these future terrors, or stockpile MREs and Lexapro or build bomb shelters out behind the condo.

I just think we are meant to use our nothing years to establish some solid sense of the good and normal. We are meant to call our mothers on Sunday afternoons. We are meant to learn the name of the old guy who always sits behind us in church and meet the teachers of our children in person. We ought to actually save some money, not just make room on our credit cards. We need to read bedtime stories and wait up for teenagers, hoping they will talk and we're coherent enough to listen.

We are supposed to check for fever by kissing a child's forehead and remember that our dogs are made for dandling behind the ears and scratching on the belly. And surely our memories of these years should be dotted with rainy afternoons when we sneaked off from work and met our spouses at home while the kids were still in school.

These things don't just happen because we feel like doing them. They are small moments laid out with deliberation brick by brick, shoring up our defenses against an uncertain future.

Jacey Eckhart, jacey87@mac.com