The sun was no more than a half-hour up when a robin suddenly burst into song!

Nope—I’m not kidding. A robin singing in December!

I was sitting at my desk, sipping coffee, when he cut loose. Startled, I looked out through the adjacent window and watched him do it—a couple of loud run-throughs.

Across the channel, the rising sun was varnishing the tops of winter-bare sycamores in a sheen of gold.

The red-breasted dandy was perched on the riverside deck’s railing, maybe three yards from where I sat, and half that distance from the well-stocked and already busy feeder.

The outdoor thermometer read a numbing 29 degrees. But our cheery fellow just reared back and sang his lilting melody as enthusiastically as if were mid-spring!

I know what I saw and heard! What I don’t know is what prompted that bird to greet such a cold winter day as if were a balmy dawning in May.

Have you ever heard a robin sing this time of year—in such cold weather?

I hear song sparrows, house finches, and Carolina wrens—of course, all it takes to put a Carolina wren into a singing mood is a single shaft of sunlight. Cardinals chirp and chickadees sing their name.

But robins, in what sounds like their sprightly vernal song…not often. I guess they gotta be in the mood. I did, however, appreciate this unusual start to the day.

Time is chugging right along.

We’ve reached that brief interregnum between Christmas and New Year. The end-of-December space, when the old year is breathing its last, and a brand new year is set to begin.

Soon we’ll embark on another circular journey into the unknown while following a familiar pathway. Twelve months, fifty-two weeks, and three-hundred and sixty-five days long.

Another year is done. One more round of life and living—its joys and sorrows, good times and bad—can soon be wrapped up and relegated to the shaky closet of memory and personal history.

Ahead lies winter’s cold and snow, spring’s returning birds and ephemeral wildflowers, summer’s lush green mantle and baking heat, autumn’s bountiful harvest and technicolored leaves.

Four seasons, designated by their boundaries of solstices and equinoxes. Nature’s ancient course. The circle within the circle within the circle, ad infinitum.

Maybe a new 2024 calendar already hangs on your kitchen wall. One with pretty pictures and proverbs. Days and weeks and months marked off and designated in their individuality. The annual circular trail, the old familiar yet mysterious journey reduced to a series of boxes and daubs of utilitarian art.

Likely some thoughtful graphics designer has already highlighted the holidays and certain important dates.

But how does your calendar fare when it comes to imparting truly useful advice? Does it offer practical alerts to keep in mind as you set out to negotiate the annual path? A heads-up caution regarding unexpected detours? Perhaps a warning about doing this or that on such-and-such day?

Does it say what delights await during April, or the pitfalls you need to avoid come October? Are there any “be prepared” predictions, auguries or omens foretelling future roadblocks and detours, losses and shattered dreams, unforeseen goodbyes and trials of aching grief you never expected?

Such moments surely await. The unexpected as well as the ordinary. The enjoyable as well as the tragic. Our lives are forever contained within this everyday matrix of the commonplace and routine, the boring and mundane…the startling and dreadful.

A year is a continual series of experiences and emotions—some good, some bad. Laughter, tears, joy, anger, confusion, exhilaration, terror, success, failure, hope, enlightenment, despair, compassion, love, death.

“Highlights and lowlights,” a friend likes to say.

Directly or peripherally, that’s life—and life happens to us all.

Alas, when it comes to personal guidance, even the snazziest version of the fanciest calendar makes a poor prophet.

And so, as we pause to deliberate, Janus-like, on these final days of December, while we know the general shape of the year ahead, we can only guess and wonder how the actual specifics will shape our lives.

What lies ahead—happiness or heartbreak? The eternal conundrum of the seasoned traveler. No wonder we feel twinges of apprehension and anticipation!

Some folks seek to skew the future by making resolutions. Promising to do this, not do that, in hopes of exempting themselves from fate via change.

Alas, my past attempts to add missing virtues or overcome or at least improve on existing character flaws, generally fail. I’m congenitally incorrigible. Too set in my quirky, cranky, bohemian, and bullheaded ways. Besides, I like the adventure of the unexpected—not knowing what lies around yonder bend.

If my calendar somehow revealed the future, I’d make haste to burn it in the woodstove before succumbing to curiosity and giving it a single glance.

I don’t want to know precisely what’s ahead! Frankly, I don’t have the heart for such foreknowledge. I far prefer to indulge and deal with my own personal truth and future in small chunks—little bite-sized bits of reality.

As we begin the old new circular journey around 2016, I hope your potholes are few and your blessings abundant.

And I hope you soon get to start one of your days with a robin’s welcome song!

Happy New Year!

Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].