My Word for MMXI

I have come to the point in my life where I need to decide whether to fall back into the bottomless depths of oblivion or to forge ahead into the raging storm of the future. At the end of this coming year I plan to retire from my present career at sixty-four and I need to decide if I am just going to pull the plug and wait for the "beeping" to stop or if I am going to sally forth and rage against the fading of the light by doing something new and different. New Year's Eve is the time when we traditionally take stock of our lives and and if we listen to our conscience and are honest with ourselves we attempt to make some adjustments. In the last few years I have limited my self to just a few resolutions and I am happy to report that I have been moderately successful in keeping them. This year, however, I have decided to reduce my resolutions even further to just one word that I can keep in front of me as a symbol for what I want to accomplish in 2011.

After careful consideration the English word that I have chosen is "ideate" (pronounced AHY-dee-aet) which is a verb that means "to form an idea of", "to think of", "to imagine" or "to conceive of". It is synonymous with "to dream", "to envision", "to fancy", to "fantasize", "to picture", "to visualize", "to conjure up", or "to see in your mind's eye". When used in the intransitive form (without an object) and in the imperative mood (command) it means:

THINK!

The thing that I really like about this word "ideate" is that it means the same thing in Spanish when you use the Spanish verb "idear" (ee-day-AHR) as a command although in the imperative it is written "idéate" (pronounced ee-DAY-ah-teh). When thinking about a symbol that would serve as a reminder of this word in both languages I chose the traditional incandescent light bulb because 130 year old invention has had such longevity as a symbol for fresh thinking. Then I had second thoughts about it because the incandescent bulb is no longer politically correct and the "green movement" that is so popular these days might take issue. I thought about using a spiral shaped CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamp) as a symbol instead until I learned that the CFL isn't as environmentally friendly as it is purported to be. For one thing it contains mercury which eventually builds up in landfills with the potential to contaminate the air and water of millions of people. In fact, the only place where CFL's are presently manufactured is in China where they are made using very cheap labor and the pollution from the mercury is already making the poor workers sick. No...I think I will stick to the incandescent bulb as a symbol for an idea until something better comes down the pike. In the meantime I'll just "ideate" about it.

Happy New Year!