I read something the other day about how the color of the
underwear you have on when you ring in the new year is an indicator of the way
the rest of the year will be. Unfortunately, the guide to what the different
colors mean included yellow and green, of which I have none, but not black,
which I have in abundance. From here this blog post can only get better, so hopefully that will make up for my wearing underwear that brings harbingers of
year-long doom.
My mother’s version of the underwear prophecy was a little
more generalized and, naturally, far less scandalous; she simply said that what you do in
general on New Year’s Eve will be reflected in the following year. Like a lot
of these kinds of predictive superstitions, this one’s purpose seems to be to
encourage a person not to sulk over the bad stuff that happened in the previous
months but rather to move forward into a brighter future. What you do now, so
it is suggested, will help create that future. Obviously this has just about as
much merit as the underwear thing; most people do fairly atypical activities on
New Year’s Eve, after all, and since I did not spend 2014 dancing to “YMCA” and
rushing out to Schnuck’s to buy mozzarella sticks to replace the ones the dog
ate, the prophecy was dead wrong for me.
In fact, I have to believe almost every prediction I’ve
tried to make about my life has been wrong. I “predicted,” wishfully, that
certain things would happen at certain points in my life, when in fact they
either took a whole lot longer than desired or didn’t happen at all. I also
failed to predict vast amounts and types of experiences I did end up having. I
could not have anticipated how unconventional my life would turn out to be, as
I’ve never really thought of myself as a “free spirit” (and frankly I rather
despise the way that term is used in popular culture, as it tends to describe
women who wear whimsical hats and nose rings rather than women who steadfastly remain spinsters
and quit perfectly good tenured jobs). Thirty years ago it would never have crossed my mind
that I would run marathons. Athletes ran marathons; I ran away from balls
thrown at me in PE.
Like a lot of people, when I was young I was ambitious, I
craved adventure. Now that I’m not quite so young any more, I’m more interested
in calmness and stability. This is not, as you might think if you’re half my
age, because I got old and boring and more risk-averse. If anything, I’m a
stronger person now than I ever was before, and I could probably handle risky
things a lot better. But at this point in my life, risk-taking often ends up
being just another way to pass the time, no better or worse than any other. Sometimes
a risky thing ends up totally worth it; sometimes it’s just hard and painful. Maybe
the key is to avoid expectations and predictions entirely. But if you aren’t
looking back for fear of regrets and you aren’t looking forward because you
might be getting your hopes up only to be crushed later, where exactly can you look?
Perhaps the thing to do on NYE isn’t to turn your back on the
past or blind yourself to the future. After all, it’s not a bad thing to see
how far you’ve come or dream about where you might still go. The trick, of
course, is to do it without regrets—or denial. People who say they have no
regrets strike me as people who aren’t thinking very hard. Me, I have a ton of
regrets. If I had to do it over again, I’d live more conventionally, be more
connected, more rooted; years of loneliness could have been avoided. Or, I’d
live an even less conventional life, totally rootless, never settling down,
always on the move to a new horizon; just think of all that wasted time I could have
spent seeing things, doing things, truly living on the edge. Yeah, I have a ton
of regrets, but the thing is, there’s no way I could have lived my life any
differently than the way it happened because of who I was—and am. To wish
things had been different is to wish I had been a different person.
So what is this person that I am doing as she faces a new
year? I am looking at cover designs for my new novel. I am planning on cooking
something fun for tonight’s festivities. I am…not running, actually, but I will
do a fairly intensive strength training workout as I recover from an injury (uh
oh…cue ominous chord). I am spending time with the dog. (The dog is eating
something gross-looking on the floor…re-cue ominous chord.) I am going to see
the BF later and we will go hang out with our friends. Nothing too crazy,
nothing to complain about. I’ll take it. Bring in the new year.
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