Into the Millennium: Open the Door and Let the Future in for Cancer Nursing Research

We welcomed the New Year 2000 in with new expectations and excitement and somehow talked about “new” and “millennium” as though our lives, professional and personal, would be different—that we would feel different and that we would see differences in our environment. We looked forward with eagerness and anticipation to a period of happiness in the indefinite future. Well, that was 14 months ago. Who among us was “transformed”? Probably few. On January 3, 2000, most of us returned to our same patterns of functioning within our same environment with our New Year’s resolutions starting to be broken. This suggests that we have to take deliberate action if change is to occur. It does not just happen by a change in date—even if that date is the millennium.