The countdown to TEDxThessaloniki 2012 has well and truly started

The countdown to TEDxThessaloniki 2012 has well and truly started.  For our core team of 25 people, it has been ongoing since the day after our last event. You could call it an obsession. Our family and TEDx organizers around the world would certainly be inclined to agree with that assessment. How else could one explain the over 3,000 TEDx events have taken place in 800 cities around the world within three years of the programme starting? Moreover, how to explain this phenomenon to someone new to the TED community?

I suppose you could say that it is the Internet being put to its best use; great ideas, by great people, filmed and spread around the world. Yet I think that would be missing something. The integral thing that drives us to come together in a room – organizing team and audience alike, before the talks are packaged to travel around the world – is an urgent and pressing need to connect and be inspired. Attending a TEDx event in person is almost impossible to describe: it is as if something, called for lack of a better word optimism or faith, has been sprayed into the air and infected participants from head to toe. Cynics you have been warned. It is uncanny.

And so we come to TEDxThessaloniki 2012. This year’s event theme, The Courage to Create, was announced on a day when a backdrop of negotiations regarding our next loan and the country’s very survival are coming to a crux. People are more worried, uncertain and desperate than ever. Where are we supposed to find the impetus, the courage to move forward and create something meaningful, when all seems so bleak and hopeless? We chose the theme months ago, but today, The Courage to Create, a phrase borrowed from the title of a 1975 well known book by psychologist Rollo May, feels like an even more relevant question.

May, a teacher of Irvin Yalom, visited our city 82 years ago exactly before our next TEDxThessaloniki event, in May 1930, when he taught at the American School. Rollo May writes in The Courage to Create:

"At a time of great change, when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born, a choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic? Shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? Or shall we seize the courage necessary to preserve our sensitivity, awareness and responsibility in the face of radical change? Shall we consciously participate, on however small the scale, in the forming of the new society?

To live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize. Courage is not the absence of despair, but rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair. If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole...."

We invite you all to join us as we consider how to move forward in the face of radical change. Fourteen amazing speakers, local and international, big names and lesser-known ones, will be coming onto the stage to express their own original and innovative ideas within 18 minutes. Some of these, like Paul Lewis’s speech at our last event, may travel on TED.com and attract 120,000 views within days.

But before all that happens, there is the TEDxThessaloniki community coming together at Olympion on May 12th. This year, we are honoured to welcome TEDx Organizers from around the Balkans and Turkey, who will be joining us too for the first workshop of its kind in our region.  Some of them, such as organizers from Serbia or Kosovo, who have recently experienced warfare, will be helping us see The Courage to Create through a different lens.

We hope to see you there. 

Eleni Andreadis, TEDxThessaloniki curator