Back to the future, or is it Forward to the past, or just time present?

Maybe it’s much too early in the game,
Gee but I thought I’d ask you just the same.
What are you doing New Years – New Years Eve.
(Treacly old song sung by a loser)

Wendy keeps asking me: “So, what do you think 2009 will be like? What would you like to see happen?”

I hate that sort of question, and usually respond with some smartass quip like: “I’d like to keep breathing,” or, “I hope I can continue to look at the blossoms rather than the bulbs.” In other words, I don’t like making future plans. This drives her nuts. She likes to speculate on what she would like to see fall into place.

Nothing wrong with that, per se. But, I think it’s a mug’s game. I subscribe, tiresome bastard that I am, to the philosophy that holds: Expectations are premeditated resentments.

Wendy hates that response even more than I hate questions about future fortunes, or lack thereof.

You see, I learned long ago that virtually nothing turns out the way you expect it will, or hope it will. It simply turns out the way it does, and I have no control over that.

I used to have expectations and fantasies about my future. I wanted to be ever so well respected in whatever I turned my hand to; possibly even slightly famous. I wanted to be well-loved and even revered. I wanted to have pots of money that would have been earned only by me doing something I loved. I wanted to have yummy sex with whichever females I fancied. I wanted to meet the ‘one-and-only’ then and fall agonizingly in love with her and she with me, and to live happily ever after with this one person. I then wanted to die at an excessively advanced age having been the picture of health and virility all my days up until then.

That was what my expectations looked like. I then adjusted them over the years when things didn’t seem to be panning out in the manner I’d ‘expected’. And at different times nasty things happened, and that ‘one-and-only’ was nothing of the sort, so then there were ‘others-and-only’, but they worked out even worse and even the sex wasn’t quite as ‘yummy’ as it was in my imaginings. Eventually I ended up deflated and depressed at the way life had unfolded. It looked nothing like I imagined it to hold in store when I was 20.

But then I discovered a great secret. That secret was to have no expectations whatsoever; to just let the days unfold as they will. I don’t mean to suggest that life should be utterly irresponsible with no look to the future. You know, you’ve gotta pay the bills; get the car serviced, and put a new roof on if one seems to be needed. I do look to the future in terms o maintaining what must be maintained, including the serenity of the household and the well-being of my beloved ‘current-and-only-life-partner’.

But otherwise, I let it unfold. It’s kind of fun. It makes life more of a great mystery, which is really what it is – and what it should be if you just let it.

So, what do I expect to see happen in 2009? I have no idea. And I am happy about that.

What am ‘I’ doing New Years Eve? Giving thanks that whoever controls this stuff allowed me to get another year in, and has left me with the slight hope I get a further one. This works for me.