30 Seconds for Reflection? Hurry and Contemplate.

CNN asks viewers to post comments and videos on their Web site reflecting on this momentous year -- and their own lives in the last year, all in just 30 seconds. Can you summarize your year in just 30 seconds? If so, would you go about it with highs and lows? Month by month? A theme into which you might force a personal historic review?

It really was quite a year. And, with or without gimmick, we should take the time to reflect. Yes, this 30-second review is a typical American approach, like saying: Here's your sound-bite approach to the world and to your life. 

Is it a sign of our busy lives, our culture, times? Or, is it that we prefer life in highs and lows, mostly feeling an aversion to the grey of an ordinary day, or an ordinary year? The good news for us is that a series or ordinary days didn't, this time, make an ordinary year. An historic election. A war continues. A complex and seemingly powerful recession. And, the fascinating ways our own stories overlap day after day. 

I know I sometimes struggle with looking back and reflecting -- taking responsibility not so much for what I did, but what I didn't do in the 365 previous days. So, I took the challenge, and what I found was less a refrain on my own shortcomings, and more a grateful review of a complex year in my life. I also invited my friends to do the same and will share my own and their summaries in the days ahead.  Until then, happy reflection....