THE PATH OF THE UNKNOWN

2023 will erase your plans, so celebrate that

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore, since it suggest a control of events that I no longer care to lie to myself about. Sure, I make plans and have goals, but I know that serendipity and outright mistakes will define the next twelve months as much as dates scrawled in my notebook. For example, there are completed projects I thought would have been released by now. There are others that should have been completed but aren’t. There are ideas that I’ve had to abandon and others, once abandoned and almost forgotten, that have sprung to life like Frankenstein’s monster.

Control has always seemed a bit of an illusion to me. Or, as director Jim Jarmusch observed in one of his films, there are limits to control. You can control starting a project and you can control putting an effort into making it quality. But the process of creation is rife with surprises, set backs, and discoveries that can derail or redirect you. It is not the original idea that ultimately defines a project (or a life), but the mid-air adjustments required. Michael Jordan’s most remarkable play wasn’t a dunk, but an almost dunk that turned into a lay up against the Lakers, which foreshadowed his winning his first title. Whether you call it grace under pressure like Hemingway or hear improvising over a show tune melody like Sonny Rollins, facing and embracing the unexpected (and unwanted) is usually the only way home.

So this January you can set off on your journey with a clear course. You have deadlines and budgets and pitches. You have it all mapped out, clear and sharp as winter air. But whatever lines drawn in the sand are gonna look crooked by morning and be washed away by the next afternoon. Nothing happens on your schedule the exact way you planned it — no matter what the analytics tell you. So I say, knowing that capriciouness is the truth nature of fate, tonight let’s just all celebrate the path of the unknown into 2023, knowing it will soon appear before us and pull us, relentlessly, in a new direction.