By Abe Villarreal
As we approach 2025, it’s easy to think of time in quarters. We’ve been living this twenty-first-century life for almost a quarter century. Some of you may be living in your third or fourth quarter of life. 2025. Seems like a year that will be remembered for something, for some time to come.
It will soon be 25 years since I graduated from high school. We were called the class of the millennium and there were great fears that we would all disappear when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999.
It was an exhilarating time. If you were my age, you wanted to see what would happen on that first day of the new century. If you were my parents' age, you saved up canned food, water jugs, and dried beans to survive in this brave new and unknown world.
Parents have experienced more in life than their 18-year-old kids. They know to prepare “just in case” things happen. When you are in high school, you are willing to “take the chance” that something will happen. Those are the two life philosophies that you live through. The “take the chance” period and the later in life “just in case” period.
Living through transitional times is always exciting. If you want it to be. It may be hard to see at the time that you are living through history. You see the numbers change but until time passes by, something like 25 years, you realize that there are real differences in the before and after.
Like living without the internet and then living by the rules of the internet. Where we go and how fast we get there. Choosing a restaurant and even picking a spouse. We were different 25 years ago. At least we acted like it.
Or waiting to see what would happen when it happened because life made it happen that way. We don’t do that anymore. Now we want to guide our own destinies. We are in charge of it and why not? We know what’s best for ourselves. We have all the information we need in the palm of one hand. It’s all there and there’s no stopping us.
I think that change, that way of thinking, has got us to where we are today. Some like it and some don’t. Sometimes, I’m not sure that I like it all that much. I can only think that way because I remember what we were like a quarter century ago.
We were driven, but we were also accepting of what fate had given us. We were forward-thinking, but we also acknowledged that there was much we didn’t know and that it was okay that we didn’t know it. In a way, we were more balanced as a people.
We need balance. The kind that helps us stay grounded in that time that we remember, and the kind that helps us stay energized to march forward into another quarter century.
I see the balance fully embraced when I speak to those lucky enough to have lived through three or four-quarters of a century. They were able to keep going, to keep changing, and to keep living because they recognized that life was about evolution but also about consistency.
In the next 25 years, I hope we all look back and remember how life threw us some curve balls during the last 25, and how we managed to keep on going. To keep on changing. To keep on valuing what we had during the first 25.
Abe Villarreal writes about the traditions, people, and culture of America. He can be reached at
