Over a holiday meal I asked my extended family if they had any predictions for 2025. Always at the ready to make a charged statement, I waited for someone to respond: would they bring up bird flu or what may happen during Trump’s second presidency? What about the economy or climate change or the impacts, both on the environment and on our collective culture of knowledge, creativity and discovery, of AI? I was prepared with my predictions, but as I looked around the long table where my mom, my grandmother, my brother and his wife, my in-laws, and my two children sat, no one dared to speak. This was a highly unusual response—highly.
Then Bruce, my father-in-law, shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I don’t know. What do I know? Business?”
As a longtime manufacturer, he does know business. What struck me about his response and the lack thereof from everyone else at the table wasn’t an indication of a sudden loss of words. Rather, what I think Bruce verbalized was the profound wisdom that I’ve fought tooth and chipped nail with over this last year: life is uncertain. Life is a series of “I don’t knows.” We want to know what’s coming or make surefire predictions to ward off any danger or misfortune, but life doesn’t work that way.
For most of my entire life, thanks to my anxious brain that a doctor once said served my distant pre-civilization well—always on the lookout for saber tooth tigers—I cling to scraps of certainty, planning, and predictions. Confronting the negatives, like another global pandemic or rising temperatures, makes me feel like I’ll be prepared for the next catastrophe. If I worry about the future, perhaps that heat wave or virus won’t be as deadly. Of course, there’s a certain degree of privilege in my anxious thinking: I am not in Gaza or Ukraine where bombs have killed and maimed. Closer to home, I am housed, fed, clothed, and employed. My form of handwringing is a bit exaggerated and pretentious, and when I’m caught in a cycle of “what ifs” I try on a cloak of gratitude, even when things went sideways this past year. Yes, we faced many health crises but we had access to care, we had a community of friends and family that made meals, entertained the kids, and held hands when words felt short of their usual comfort.
Like Bing Crosby advises Rosemary Clooney in my favorite Christmas film, “White Christmas,” the worries of the world, which best like to interfere with sleep, deflated power by counting your blessings. The language of blessings may or may not land with you, but in my foolhardy attempt to wrangle the globe into measured assurance, I’ve come to learn that it’s wise to be like Bruce and admit your own uncertainty and to then think about the things that you know to be true, right here and now, in your life. For me, as a kid who couldn’t get away from home fast enough after high school, to find myself in middle age surrounded by my family living in the Flathead, is as good of a situation as I could have ever imagined.
My attempt at inciting predications for the new year—and perhaps slightly tinged with a desire for debate—fell flat. Instead, a simple declaration was all the certainty I needed. Here’s to “I don’t know” in 2025.