Bermuda began celebrating its 400th anniversary of human settlement in earnest on Saturday. Now there will be events throughout the year marking the accomplishments, and failures, of the last four centuries.

But this year, as the organisers of Imagine 2009 have been striving to do, should also be an opportunity to think a little harder about what kind of Bermuda we want now and in the future.

There are lessons to be learned from the past and it is worth taking some time to honour and look at the past and identify those strengths and weaknesses that have enabled Bermuda to be successful.

But it is risky to assume that doing the same things will result in similar successes, or that they simply just happened.

Still, the story of Bermuda is a remarkable one. Bermuda's settlement begins with the Sea Venture in 1609, but the Bermuda Company colony was founded in 1612 with high expectations and stunningly low results. Neither ambergris nor tobacco were present, or could be grown in the latter case, in great amounts. It is worth remembering that for much of Bermuda's history, it has been a poor place, literally hanging on for survival on this 20-square mile rock, 700 miles from the closest landfall.

Certainly that was the case for the Island's first 200 years as a small population relied on the sea and trade for survival. There were ups and downs, but this was a pretty basic life, both for free whites and blacks and for the enslaved.

It was not until the construction of the British bases after the American Revolution and the renaissance of agriculture that Bermuda began to thrive, and the Twentieth Century then saw the growth of first tourism and then international business.

Throughout all of this time, however, Bermudians have had to live mostly by their wits, finding products and new markets in which to sell them, and often depending on others – the British military, American agricultural consumers, American tourists and international companies – to survive and succeed.

That ability has stood Bermuda in good stead, but it is necessarily a matter of being constantly aware that Bermuda's survival often hangs by a thread. Cheaper ways than raking salt killed that trade, steam killed Bermuda cedar ship building, US tariffs eventually killed Bermuda export agriculture and both tourism and international business are just as much at risk. We have no room for complacency.

The other critical narrative for Bermuda concerns the emancipation of the black Bermudian population, first from slavery, then from segregation and even today, to find a way to eliminate the wealth gap between blacks and whites.

This too is a compelling story, with heroes and villains. It is easy to argue that nothing in Bermuda happened fast enough and the fact that genuine adult suffrage only came into place 40 years ago remains an indictment on the then-establishment.

But the other side of that story is the fact that Bermuda accomplished desegregation and civil rights with remarkably little violence or rancor among either whites or blacks, and in doing so, laid the foundations for the Island's current success.

Two threads run through Bermuda's history: One is the ability and need to live by our wits and to adapt to changing circumstances; the other is the recognition that we all live on a small rock in the North Atlantic, and that we can either rise and survive together or we can sink separately.

When we debate the Bermuda of the future, those are the traits we need to emphasise: An intelligence and flexibility that will ensure that the Island is economically secure, along with a mutual respect and tolerance that will ensure that we have social stability.