The Year of Hearing Dangerously

I've written more this year than in any of the previous two years of this blog, although the pace has slowed over the last months as my life stayed very busy and made writing here less compelling.

To close out the year, here are some things I experienced or learned in 2008 that I can share without revealing events better left in my or someone else's private life.

• Hearing aids have a five-year life span. They require increasing attention and repair thereafter, and if you use two, you'll be half deaf for much of the time while waiting for one of them to be repaired. Once this year, both of my nearly ten-year old hearing aids became defective at once, making me functionally deaf and seriously impeding my ability to do my job. New ones had to await the start of 2009 because of substantial tax advantages, but help is now on the way (including Bluetooth capability!). And I'll know to budget for replacements in 2014.

• Assuming that "fate" has intervened to place you into contact with someone is dangerous. Even if it's true, fate's purpose might just as easily be to force you to learn from your disagreements and your falling out with them as from your commonalities and companionship. Fate's role is best determined decades later.
  

• True friends are timeless. Absence from them or not hearing from them have no effect on your feelings for them. If you're antsy because you haven't heard from someone, they're not your friend, but someone you're using to keep yourself emotionally occupied. They're a crutch. Make them your friend by letting them come and go – or to slightly rework the line from "Hey Jude": "let 'em out and let 'em in."
  

• If someone involves you in a decision in which you have a stake, but not the final say, then keep your emotions out of it. If you give advice, expect it to be ignored or rejected so that you don't get your feelings hurt. Your main function is to serve as a sounding board, not a participant.
  

• The single security line at the Denver airport is the most grotesque abomination in the history of air travel. At this monster airport, everyone goes through the same line. Any natural anxiety about travel is compounded by the sight of thousands of people ahead of you in line. When you reach the metal detectors and x-ray machines, they don't even take you on a first come, first served basis, but force you to choose between 6-8 lines, meaning you may well see people who were behind you get ahead if they choose more wisely.
  

• If I were charged with a crime of which I was innocent, I would want a jury composed of people like those I met when called for jury duty last summer. No one wanted to be there, and everyone griped about the way we got herded around and left in the dark for long stretches. But when the time came and we almost got put on a jury, everyone was extremely conscientious and highly respectful of the court and the law.
  

• Taking first-year Italian helped me see a lot of things from the students' perspective for the first time in twenty years. I never realized how hard it was to ignore your phone till I was sitting in class with one in my pocket. Book prices and academic bureaucracy were other experiences to which I was reintroduced. Our students are a tolerant bunch – I can't imagine professors routinely putting up with it all. And I've never been more grateful for a helpful, hardworking, and tolerant teacher: thanks Roberta!

• Biggest regret: Even when you hear the words being spoken to you, there is great peril in assuming that you assign the same meaning to them as the speaker. On more than one occasion this year, I've heard stories and interpreted them in the light of similar experiences I've had. In the end it emerged that the similarities were deceptive; the other person and I were talking past each other without realizing it. We got thumped, and thumped others in the process. This is my biggest regret of the year, and if I could apologize to those others in person, I would do so.
  

• Most grateful for: I'm happiest this year that people emerged or reappeared to challenge me to move out of the same old patterns and habits, or at least to question them. The patterns and habits were there for a reason, of course. They represented my approach to life, one I had grown comfortable with and had succeeded with. Tennyson's line, "Though much is taken, much abides," was never more apt. That I've been able to add to my comfort by selectively challenging its very premises has been the one thing I've been most grateful for this year.

Merry Christmas. Happy 2009.