January 2, 2003

• Happy New Year, Everyone!
  
  2002 is over; 2003 is beginning. The upcoming year promises many expected changes for me and my family, the details of which I will not forecast for you now (although I'm sure you'll hear about many of them as they happen). And I'm sure there will be many unexpected changes in the next year that I could never imagine now as I'm sitting here typing this (and you'll probably hear about many of those, too).
  
  I recently read through a diary I kept during 1980. On New Year's Day 1980, I wrote that I could feel that many changes were coming for me in the next year - great things were coming. I didn't yet know that I would start college that coming summer, take my first philosophy course, or meet my future husband that fall. (I even found the first-ever mention of my future husband in the diary where I quoted some silly thing he used to say all the time.) But on that first day of the new year, I had no clue whatsoever of where I'd be by year's end. My expectations of greatness were only adolescent excitement and hope. After all, I was only 16.
  
  I do not even remember most of the people, most of the little daily dramas, that I recorded in that diary. Those events I thought important enough at the time to record for posterity turned out to be of virtually no lasting significance.
  
  And the girl I was then... never in a million wild guesses could she have predicted that at the end of the next 22 years she'd have three mostly-grown children, a successful 20 year marriage, 2 college degrees, be a published writer, or any of the other thousands of things I've done and seen and been during that time. The girl I was then thought her future adult life was roughly modeled on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. She had no clue as to how to achieve such a life, but Mary Richards represented the modern woman and that's exactly what I expected to be.
  
  And thinking about what I couldn't have known then makes me wonder, too, where might I be in another 20 years? What unpredictable destination will I find myself at? (which, though unpredictable, was still caused by everything which had preceded it - significant, remembered, or not.) What now is truly important in bringing about that unknown destination? What will I remember? What should I remember? What will I forget? What should I forget?
  
  But the sad fact is that we cannot know. There is no crystal ball into which we could gaze for clues. We journey along in the dark each day, feeling and groping towards that which we long for, sometimes snagging it, sometimes missing it, but always moving toward that unpredictable destination, through unexpected changes, looking back from time to time to reassess the journey.

  • 10:07 am
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