Today is the big day! Time to take down your old giant circular stone Mayan calendar and replace it with the new one that the Humane Society sent you. I am ready to hang ‘Kittens in Baskets’ above the desk but I need to rent a fork-lift and hire a general contractor first.

I enjoy being part of a good apocalypse frenzy every now and again. Some are more believable and frenzied than others so I’ve learned to be selective. For Y2K I brought my A-game. Anyone with the amount of student loan debt that I had back then was rooting for the collapse of society and the credit rating system. That solution to my financial woes didn’t work out at all the way I though it was going to.

As a Floridian, mini-apocalypses (pronounced hurr-i-canes), occur often enough to keep me in a constant state of preparedness. Jugs water, cans of food, bottles of medicinal whiskey, and FEMA forms are always on hand for the unpredictable wrath of Neptune.

The 12-21-12 Mayan Calendar Scare was (is) a little more concerning. Thanks to Hollywood there have been at least a dozen different versions of what this particular End of Days could have looked like. How do you prepare for magnetic pole shifts, asteroids, zombies, epic solar flares, AND the Vogon Constructor Fleet? You don’t… you just wait.

For me, I have an added Earth shattering event that falls on this day. The middle child turns 14 today. My blond girl has morphed from a sack of potatoes to a young woman in a terrifyingly short time. I merely blinked and she’s already preparing to take her straight A’s and beautiful smile to high school. Maybe this is what the Mayans were talking about. I know she will tear some hearts and worlds asunder, and it would be a lie to say that I am not a little afraid for myself.

The people trying to calm the terrified masses liked to point out that the Mayans didn’t actually predict a fiery death for us all. Instead, they explained how it signified the end of one era and the beginning of the next. This can be interpreted in a lot of different ways depending on where you sit on the Optimist-Pessimist Spectrum. Since I perch on the end with the sunny dispositioned folks, I am excited by what a new era could mean.

Can you picture it? We are all standing on the brink of a new period in human history. War, hate, hurt, and greed have run their course and the Era of Compassion is upon us: compassion for other humans, compassion for ourselves, compassion for all living things and even the Earth herself.

It wont be like the flipping of a light switch. Instead the gradual change has been occurring since civilization was born and began crawling into the future. However, I can easily imagine that today we’ve reached a tipping point. Love and caring are rapidly replacing fear and selfishness. Each forthcoming generation will be more prepared to live a life of compassion. They’ll be paving the way for their children and grandchildren who will be jogging into the future, holding aloft a torch of love.

The changes occurring in the present are staggering. The vegan movement is growing exponentially. The meat industry is reporting losses as less and less people buy their cellophane wrapped cruelty. The dairy industry is suffering as their customer base begins to see clearly through their brainwashing campaigns and practices. We are winning this war of compassion and as our numbers continue to grow our collective future becomes brighter and brighter.

Happy New Era to you all, and Happy Birthday Blondie!