It’s New Year’s Day, 2009. Nothing particularly symmetrical or foreboding about 2009. It’s not 2000, it’s not Orwell’s 1984, it’s not a nice round number like 2020, it’s actually a pretty arbitrary day if you think about it.

Most fiscal years start in another month. (And why is that? The feds’ calendar starts October 1, the academic year is typically the first of July; are we pacing things for the nation’s auditors?) But that’s fodder for another column. New Year’s Day, the end of the holiday season, the beginning of resolutions, the avowed beginning to the end of the unwanted pounds, habits, and vices.

I’m a book semi-junky. I have moments of spontaneous acquisition of books like some people buy candy bars from the checkout aisle. There’s a used bookstore in the Milwaukee airport. I’m drawn to it like some people gravitate to shoe stores or electronic gadgetry. Books, especially cheap books, find their way to me like lint finds the dryer screen.

They are not all the same genre. Fiction can draw from the debit card as readily as history or my most recent scores, a couple books about change, and how we think about change. So here we are on New Year’s Day. And here I am in mid-life with plenty of reason to think about change, anticipate it, try to figure out how to manage it. I buy books about change, simultaneously wondering why on earth there is a market for such a thing, and then chuckling at myself for my little joke at my expense.

Change. Hang with me for a moment and think of this: since the first breath you took after the umbilical cord was cut, you have successfully managed change. As soon as you were old enough to determine how much clothing to add or shed in response to the weather, as soon as you mastered gravity and balance and rode a bicycle, the bizarre sensations accompanying the first attempts to drive a car - remember all that? You changed. You succeeded. You mastered your environment. And the change kept coming.

You recall typing documents on a typewriter? Do you remember your first encounters with a gray or ochre screen of a computer? Remember life before email? The internet, cell phones? Automatic transmission? For those under 30 these are essentials of life. To those of us over 50 there were days of reckoning with steep learning curves. But like a toddler looking at a fork, we figured it out, we improvised, we learned.

When we are young our parents are invincible, strong, smart, and wise. Rebelling against their authority was a form of acknowledging the significance of their role in our lives. As we age our parents show fallibility, one parent dies before the other and we gain insight into the sum of the two parts, or lack thereof. Along with the passing of one parent comes the appreciation of the individuals, unfortunately only possible with the successful negotiation of our grief. We emote, we adapt, we heal, and we move on. We are not aware of it as it happens. Like the most hurtful or tragic of events that we experience, we don’t know how we are going to get to the other side of them. We just do. The most bitter of divorces, the death of a child, the loss of a job, we endure, we adjust, we learn. No matter how tragic or difficult, we survive, we grow. We change.

A friend of mine just experienced a job shift. Previously in command of a successful career, he hit a slick spot when a cutback led to the loss of a job. After a short hiatus which included his realization that his dog was not adjusting well to its alteration in nap schedules, he accepted another job in the midst of several offers. “I have learned,” he said, “to just do my best to get out of God’s way.” Depending on your theology, you may have certain ideas about the extent of a supreme power’s involvement in any given individual’s career path, choice of mate, or who to vote for. I can’t answer that one.

It’s New Year’s Day. 2009 will bring change. New president, both on the local hill and in the nation’s capitol. Babies will be born, folks we love will pass away, there will be good things that we can’t imagine now and bad things we’d rather not experience if we had our druthers. We will know of the depths and heights of human capabilities.

Happy New Year, may it be a good one for our world and our loved ones.