For whatever reason, we attach significance to "zero" years, marking them as beginnings and endings. Any "zero" year is seen as the start of a new decade, and sometimes a "zero" year will mark the start of a new century or millennium (though some insist, as did the great Arthur C. Clarke, that none of these start until the first "1" year; I agree with these folks, but good luck overturning popular perception).
In any event, I look back over the preceding ten years and see how much my life has changed. The more I looked, the more I thought back to the ten years before that, and so on, and how much has changed, both around me and within. Some decades have been more dramatic than others.
Ten years ago, I was finishing up my graduate coursework. I still had a dissertation to write, and deep inside I was dreading it. When I wasn't in school, I was living next to my folks. I had regained my health after a moderate crisis the summer of 1999. My biggest priority was finding work, and my sights were on the Washington, DC area. The city fascinated me and I knew people there, notably someone with whom I was then very smitten. To say the least, there were some surprises ahead. I'd yet to be fired from a job, and had yet to leave the contiguous 48 states.
Twenty years ago, I was midway through high school. I'd spent most of 1989 dealing with some serious anxiety issues, and my recovery wasn't helped by the fact that each school day began in the classroom of a geometry teacher whose classroom manner could most charitably be described as "cruel." In my chemistry class, I tried to fight off my anxiety by being a class clown, and nearly flunked. My ambitions in January 1990 were to buy a new computer to replace the dual-floppy 8088 my parents had bought me the year before, and to pass the AP history exam later in the spring. My income was based primarily on doing yardwork and odd jobs for neighbors. I had only vaguely started thinking about college. I had never flown in an airplane. Except for one trip with a friend's family, I had never traveled beyond my home state's adjoining states.
Thirty years ago, I was a couple years into elementary school. My brother and I rode the bus each day; we were usually among the first on the bus in the mornings and the last home at the end of the day. I had a classmate who ate Elmer's paste and a teacher who was distressed by my obsession with airplanes. (Wonder what she'd make of the fact that close to 20 years later, I earned my master's degree with a thesis about airplanes?) My parents, bless them, didn't see eye to eye with her on that, as well as some other things. They gave me and my brother an allowance of $3 a week; it seemed like a fortune to us.
Sometimes your mind wanders while you're in idle moments. I remember occasional moments throughout the 1990s when I'd wonder to myself where I'd be 10 years from now. What will I be doing for a living? Where will I live? What will my house look like? What kind of car will I drive? Will I find love? What adventures will I have had? What will the world look like? What joys and horrors lie ahead? How will I be different then? You wonder about these things, and meanwhile, life happens. The world changes around you, even as you don't realize it.
The funny thing is, even with everything that's happened around me, most of the 2000s felt fairly stable. They got off to a bumpy start, with a move, a firing and a move to a new location, but after I settled into a new job in 2001, things leveled out. There have been occasional crises, of course, but we've found ways through them.
As for me, I know the many ways I've changed over the last ten years. Many dreams and ambitions I had gave way to reality, and more than a little of the cheer I once had has hardened into skepticism, if not cynicism. I've learned the wisdom of thinking before saying anything, and the even greater wisdom that sometimes the best thing you can say is nothing at all. I've learned the wisdom of waiting and seeing. I've learned that life will always come with varying degrees of heartbreak, and that the secret is in learning to accept it and making the most of what you do get.
Perhaps the biggest change is in what I worry about. Ten years ago, I couldn't see much beyond myself. My main concerns were about me, about my future, about my hopes and well-being. Ten years later, I don't worry about my own fortunes so much. Whatever it is inside me -- whether it's faith, or whether it's a gambler's instinct, or both -- tells me that whatever happens, I'll find a way through it.
What I do find myself worrying about, though, are those around me. My own well-being doesn't worry me half as much as wondering when hubby will get a call-back on a job application. I could be in a small plane flying through pea-soup cloud cover in the mountains of Alaska and wouldn't really worry, and yet I don't ease up each day until hubby comes home safely from his usual commute.
If you'd told me at the start of any of the three previous decades that I'd be like this in 2010, I'd have laughed.
