THE WORD: Happy New Year to our readers, many of whom we have found to be supportive. We could not have gone this far without their lively rapport sustaining and guiding us.

As we’ve said elsewhere, a publication is nothing without its public. A writer is nothing without his reader.

Such is the nature of the Communicated Word: for it to be a true, living verbo, it needs a sender and a receiver interacting through a medium. Without the receiver, the word, pulsating though the medium with its message, drifts into the vast space of nothingness.

Expanding the idea, we see that such is also the reciprocal nature of interpersonal relationships. We are never alone. We cannot ever be alone. There is always somebody out there waiting for a word from us.

Maybe we can pause on this day and list down all the persons we have longed to talk with but failed to reach. Call them or write them or send a short email now. Or put down this newspaper or switch off that TV — and lean over and talk to him/her now. A warm hug would help.

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HELLO, ARE YOU THERE?: Many times, a problem arises either because we totally failed to communicate or we miscommunicated. The latter situation means that we connected all right but sent the wrong message or we sent the right message but it was misunderstood.

It’s not always our fault because external factors continually disturb the communication process. (But that does not mean that there is always somebody else or something else to blame when we get entangled in a bad case of miscommunication.)

Applying this to our personal lives, if we look hard enough we’ll see that some of our nagging problems can be traced to our neglecting to continually keep the other person informed.

An information vacuum, or any vacuum for that matter, invites all sorts of extraneous matters to rush in. And when they do, we reap a messy whirlwind.

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HELD HOSTAGE BY FEAR: Many individuals emerging from such personal crises have said that they were able to break free from the tangle of problems mainly because they made the hard decision to make a clean breast of everything and face the truth no matter what.

We are often held hostage by lurking fears — fear of what might happen if we did or said this or that, fear of what people might say, fear of something horrible that we have been imagining….

We are being blackmailed by our own fears, which are usually figments of our troubled mind. The more we entertain those fears, the more frightening the figment appears. Fear feeds upon itself and consumes us.

If you look back, you will be amazed at how many personal problems — which at the time you thought were enough to break you — had simply vanished with time after your failure to confront them in gladiatorial fight. You survived them and can now look back to them with amusement.

The reason is that those supposedly gargantuan problems were just in the mind. They exemplify those scary scenarios arising from thought of what people would say if… what would happen to us if….

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WORRYING IN ADVANCE: Now if the problem arises from some factual incident or condition, there’s a difference. But while we cannot alter the facts, we can change, we can control, our thoughts about those facts.

Do not worry in advance. We’ve seen many people punishing themselves with sordid thoughts of possible dire consequences of something terrible that might happen if… — but which later did not materialize at all.

Of course there are real problems we have to confront and solve. What we’re saying is that if you look close enough and sort out your problems, you’ll discover that more than half of them are just in your mind. Most of those psychological ones you can solve easily, we dare say, by just ignoring them.

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A VACUUM SUCKS: Going back to the problem of communication, many reporters are goaded into a frenzy of research, or even speculation and the invoking of “unnamed sources,” because of lack of information.

When the jittery head of an agency fearful of (usually imagined) adverse publicity clams up or refuses to be candid to the press, he is courting (self-inflicted) serious trouble.

The usual consequence is for reporters covering him to bypass him and try harder seeking information elsewhere. Investigative initiative is one of the common sources of big scoops, which are often negative to the official keeping the lid on them.

In tending to long-gestation projects or in carrying out programs in stages, experience tells us that it is always best to keep the public informed every step of the way. Be forthright. This assumes, of course, that the project is on the level and there is no smelly hanky-panky to cover up.

Trying to explain after all the negative stories have come out is difficult because the public mind had been poisoned by the earlier reports. Supplanting an idea already instilled in the public mind is doubly difficult, because before one can plant his own crop of ideas, he first has to clear the weeds overrunning the field.

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CURATIVE CLEANSING EFFECT: On this fresh first day of the new year, maybe we should all refrain from being critical, being accusative, being negative of our neighbors. It would do all of us much good if we allowed the cheer and goodwill of Christmas to spill over to at least the first few days of 2002.

Doing this for the first day/s of the incoming year might prove difficult for some of us, especially for us in the newspaper game. Breaking free from the Bad News syndrome that has become virtually a way of life for us is difficult given the drift of reportage of Philippine media.

But many of those who have tried taking a positive perspective report that it has had some kind of curative or cleansing effect on them.

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IT’S NOW 2002!: When writing the current date, most, if not all, of us are likely to commit in the next few days the mistake of writing the old year 2001 when we mean the new 2002.

Unlike the seasons and such transitions ordained by nature, changes in us humans in relation to others do not come automatically. We often have to will it first, then concentrate on carrying out the changes we have planned for ourselves.

Despite the awesome power in her hands, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is no exception. As she most likely has discovered to her frustration, one tool the president of this country lacks is a magic wand. The president does not simply decide to do something, issues the order and sees immediate and full execution of her wishes.

We wish the President success because whatever good emerges from good government will be good for all of us. This does not mean, as we are wont to say, that we are dropping our self-imposed assignment of critically monitoring her administration and the government in general.

If there is one thing we presume to tell the President, it is that after she has laid down the plans (done), she should keep the people continually and fully informed. And in this communication process, there should always be honesty.