This Year

I've peered into your future and will now reveal it to you

Alphonse Osbert, Painting 2 (1918).

This year, you will find yourself sitting at home, with the sound of nothing but the air conditioner blowing or the refrigerator buzzing, and you will think that you cannot bear this suffering any longer, that you cannot tolerate the suffocating, agonizing weight of being for a moment more. And still, you will bear it. You will tolerate it. You will wake up the next morning, and the sun will rise. And the neighbors will take out their trash, and the squirrels will scamper around, and the power lines will blow in the wind, and you’ll smell your cup of coffee and look around and think, Well, this isn’t so bad.

This year, you will find yourself dancing to a song that comes on, and you’ll feel as if you’ve found some sort of backdoor, glitch-in-the-matrix type hack for instant joy.

This year, you will lose something you thought (underneath all the intellectualizing about understanding the impermanence of things) would be there forever: a loved one, a pet, a relationship, a job, a part of yourself. It will be excruciating. Later, you will marvel at how much you’ve learned from that loss. At how much it’s given you.

This year, you will have a conversation that feels transcendent—like you have somehow conspired with your interlocutor(s) to create a space between you that is electric and pulsing and vital, that causes the collective consciousness to levitate and expand. This conversation will nourish you for some time.

This year, you will, in spite of all the cultural and technological forces working to make this impossible, feel a moment of raw, unbridled, unmediated connection with another person that is so perfect and complete that it seems to justify your entire existence.

This year, you will have moments when you’re convinced you are wholly incapable and incompetent and unworthy of being called human, and you’ll be wrong.

This year, you will have moments when you’re convinced you are perfect and flawless and omniscient, that the universe exists purely to serve you, and you’ll be wrong.

This year, you will experience, at a cellular level, what it means to be in flow: that timeless, weightless state of being and doing in which the self and its incessant insistence disappears and it feels—actually, it doesn’t just feel, you know—that God is acting through you.

This year, you will laugh when you aren’t supposed to.

This year, you will create something that you’re proud of.

This year, you will say or do something that causes the razor-sharp, full-body nausea of regret. You will think you’ve ruined everything, that what you did is irredeemable, and you’ll be wrong.

This year, you will discover something about yourself that changes your life forever, in a profoundly positive way.

This year, you will know something. You’ll know it in a way that you cannot explain or rationalize, and it won’t make logical or practical sense, and you might even hate that you know it. And other people, whether in real life or in your head, will try to tell you that you’re wrong, and sometimes, for a moment, you’ll believe them. But you will always return to that inescapable knowing. Until you act on that knowing, it will interfere with your life in ways that become increasingly inconvenient, loud, and destructive. Eventually, you will act on it, and you’ll be glad you did.

This year, you will fart at a highly inopportune moment.

This year, you will be forced to appreciate something you’ve been taking for granted.

This year, you will relearn, for the millionth time, the truth of all the obnoxious clichés: that you’re much happier when you get some sleep, go outside, move your body, eat real food, sit quietly with your thoughts, laugh with your friends.

This year, you will make a new friend.

This year, you will get into a stupid argument.

This year, you will come across a picture from a past life, and you’ll remember the person you were, and there will be a weird mix of nostalgia and embarrassment and love and regret and narrative wholeness.

This year, you will forget to change your air filter.

This year, you will discover something—a subject area, a subculture, an activity, an idea, a place, a time period, a way of seeing—that makes it feel like you’ve stumbled upon some secret, some trap door hidden behind a bookshelf. And it will, in some way, change your life forever.

This year, you will feel completely stuck. And then, at some point, you won’t.

This year, you will (re)discover your capacity for unconditional kindness, which will trigger the millionth relearning of another cliché: that giving is in fact the best form of receiving.

This year, you will get injured or sick or otherwise incapacitated, and you will be viscerally reminded of just how important your body and its ability to function is to your wellbeing.

This year, you will learn something about your family history that will explain something about you.

This year, you will stub your toe or bump your nose or hit your knee on a sharp corner, and you will curse every person or entity or cosmic force who had even the slightest fucking bit to do with the fact of your existence. You will stand by this sentiment for at least thirty seconds.

This year, you will marvel at how, in spite of your flaws and pettiness and morning breath and neuroticism and selfishness and cowlick and emotional volatility and ineptitude, there are people who refuse to stop loving you.

This year, you will be okay.