By Jennifer Vanasco

What I like best about January is this: We don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the next year.

We think that we do. We make plans as if we do. We arrange vacations. We imagine new challenges at our jobs, fantasize about a summer of beaches and long mountain hikes or plod along with the mental reassurance that this year will continue to be the same old-same old.

We think that we know what’s going to happen to us. But we don’t.

We can’t predict the year, despite all our best-laid plans, despite all our calendar-keeping and goal-setting, despite astrologers and fortune-tellers and secret omens, despite our sense that we know exactly what our lives are like, what is going to happen and who we are going to be at years end.

Instead, we are usually surprised.

Every January, I make a list of the things that surprised me in the past year. The experiences I couldn’t predict. The friends I didn’t know I’d meet. Last year at this time I had no idea that in 2007 I’d go to Guatemala or Paris, that my cousin and one of my closest friends would have babies, that I’d meet Gloria Steinem and writer Pete Hamil (two of my heroes), that my mom would move to the South, that I’d start a wonderful new job.

I didn’t know I would learn to draw or start voice lessons. I didn’t know that I would still be single. I didn’t know that one memorable night in fall, I would sail with friends across New York Harbor, the statue of liberty shining against the dark sky.

Last year at this time, I thought I knew what was going to happen in the year ahead. I had no idea.

We all have lists like this, whether or not we write them down. We all have delights that sprung from nowhere, changes that shook us like earthquakes, small (or large) heartbreaks that cracked us open.

Here we stand, still, in the dawn of 2008. Polls say that most of us have already broken our resolutions, just two weeks into the year. Whatever. Resolutions are just a continuation of our silly sense of certainty—we think we can control what will happen to us. But of course we can’t.

Some people might find all this uncertainty unnerving. Or scary. Some people look at the cloudy picture of the year ahead and want bigger flashlights so that they can peer into the darkness. Some people want insurance; they want to hedge their bets.

But instead of being frightened or anxious, let’s think of this unknown year as our annual adventure. It is our own personal theme park, full of frights and thrills and lost wallets and unexpected cotton candy.

If we don’t let ourselves get too worked up over how uncertain things are—if we instead enjoy the ride, using our heightened senses to savor every detail and juice every unexpected second—then we can see the things that happen to us this year as gifts of experience.

Here we stand, still, in the dawn of 2008. We don’t know who the next president will be. We don’t know how the Middle East situation—in Palestine and Israel, in Iraq, in Iran, in Syria—will pan out. We don’t know how much worse environmental damage will get, or what amazing scientific and technological discoveries will transform our lives. We don’t know the news stories that will shape our lives this year, or the great tragedies that will bring us together.

In our own lives, we don’t know whom we will meet or who will become unexpectedly important to us. We don’t know what ideas will suddenly strike us one morning over coffee. We don’t know what office rock walls we’ll need to climb with precision and strength. We don’t know what books or movies or plays will engages us and shake us to tears or laughter.

All we know is that we stand on the edge of 2008, with our toes barely dipped in the pool of the year. Let’s not call this anticipation we feel fear. Let’s call it hope and dive right in.

     

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com. She blogs daily at the gay political site VisibleVote08.com and keeps a sometimes-updated archive of columns at jennifervanasco.com.