“By 2000, machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy. With Government benefits, even nonworking families will have an annual income of $30,000 to $40,000 (in 1966 dollars). How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem, and one expert foresees a pleasure-oriented society full of ‘wholesome degeneracy.’”

This quotation from the February 25, 1966 issue of Time Magazine looks into the future and sees what has not come close to happening. Unless you, unlike me, have become independently wealthy and are overwhelmed with leisure, this prediction has proven spectacularly wrong-headed. Time’s crystal ball thirty-five years ago must have had a few cracks in it.

As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once wryly observed, “ prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Throughout history, those who have tried to foresee the next decades or centuries have most often failed to guess right.  I myself used to predict that by this time in history international air travelers would be shot in rockets from continent to continent and arrive in minutes rather than hours.

Still, our arrival at the year 2001 – a new year and, by some reckoning, a new century and a new millennium – almost inevitably stirs thinking about change and renewal. For some of us it is a time for resolutions, for setting right things in our life that need fixing. It is also a time for new hope and starting over.

If we have any spirit at all,  the new year is going to be a time for renewal. Have not people always felt it to be so? There seems to be something built into us human beings that takes the swing of years as an inducement for new beginnings.

In the spiritual life, past failures do not mean we cannot start again. The beauty of living as a searcher is that each day presents new opportunities for  growth and inspiration. If we stay open to being surprised, then moving into a new era can indeed fool us in many welcome ways.

There was a time in my life when I thought I knew exactly what the future held for me. All the years lay ahead in my imagination along a time line that seemed to me perfectly predictable. The initial religious training given me in a Jesuit novitiate amounted to a plan for living the rest of my life; I considered it foolproof. At age 21 I naively wrote in my journal: “I am going to make progress in proportion as I follow the route I have planned for myself.”

As it has turned out, however, my life has become quite different from anything that I imagined. With decade succeeding decade, I entered upon new experiences which surprised all my expectations. New people, new opportunities, new skills – all came tumbling toward me as time moved on. Very little of it could I ever have predicted, nor could anyone else.

I feel glad that life has turned out so differently from expectation. Mind you, there has been a lot of trial and error connected with these changes. More often than is comfortable to think about, I have made mistakes that hurt me and other people. There were times in my life, as in just about everyone’s, when I did not know where I was headed.

And, even now in this new age of 2001, I have no guarantee of safe passage toward the future. Inevitably, things will go wrong for me and I will be entangled in sometimes desperate struggle to find my way.

But is it not good for us that we cannot predict the future, either our own or the world’s? That counts as one of life’s treasures, our being unable to see clearly ahead. Just as utopian visions of the world’s future fail to discern what is really going to happen, so visions of our own future cannot ever be assured of coming true.

The vital need is not to sell ourselves short. As people with spirit inside us, we have a future, whether long or short. That future being unknown is what makes our life an adventure, a high-wire act that can prove worth sticking around for.

Richard Griffin