As 2019 draws to a close, I find myself grappling with the question: what, to date, has been the most interesting year of your life?

I’ve gone back and forth about how to define “interesting” in the context of my life (after all, being born was pretty interesting), but, if I had to answer, I would say this past year has been the most interesting year of my life. Why? Well, in the past year I:

wandered carelessly through the streets of New York at 4 am on New Year’s Day
ran the frozen backwoods roads of New Hampshire each afternoon at sundown
lived with three of my best friends, two apartments down from three more of my best friends
chanted Messi’s name in the Camp Nou after he chipped Lyon’s keeper in a Champions League tie
got lost under a pleasant spring sun in the Casa de Campo
worked with some of the coolest people around on projects for patients struggling with obesity and children with autism
stood on top of St. Peter’s Basilica
ran my last race in a Dartmouth uniform
graduated from college
danced gleefully around the Maypole on the summer solstice in Stockholm
swam in the clear white waters of Dubrovnik
watched children splash around the Piazza San Marco
ran from town to town in Slovenia waving to quick little cars driving next to me on mountain roads
lay one rainy summer afternoon under a wooden roof thinking of home
hiked the Alps
watched the finish of the Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées as the sun set behind the Arc de Triomphe.

Here are some of those memories:

didn’t have my phone or camera in Casa de Campo. This photograph, Path on Tìo Pìo, is from that evening — didn’t have my phone or camera in Casa de Campo. This photograph, *Path on Tìo Pìo*, is from that evening

some of the coolest people around (on the right)

also the Alps, but in Switzerland, and with water

Reflecting on 2019, I wondered what 2020 would bring. The events that most defined my past year were largely unforeseen. Trying to predict the future was as futile as trying to change the past. And yet, there was one question that stuck in my head: Would my life be as interesting* in 2020 as it was in 2019?

Presently

I live in Washington, D.C. I have the monuments every morning and the sun coming up on the Potomac. I have friends who push my thinking and make me laugh. My days have aesthetic beauty and pop-culture references and off-the-cuff philosophical zings and memes. I could do with more hugs and seeing my parents more. I miss my college friends, but it doesn’t hurt too much. I will see them again. I care about them too much not to see them again.

So, this is to say life is good. Sure, there are things about my life I would change, but on a whole, I like it. For one thing, I am grateful to be gainfully employed doing work that forces me to think. I am grateful I still have time to write, still have time to run, still have time to see friends. Granted, I have less of it, and I wonder how much of my “grateful I still” is indicative of how we (recent college graduates) tend to conceptualize the “real world” as a loss of, well, something. When I went to college, I wasn’t thinking: “Wow, I’m so grateful I still….” I was mostly just starstruck with all the interesting things, people, ideas--all the newness.

Now, there is still newness to be found, but it’s harder, and you have to plan for it. I’ve spoken with some of my friends about this. Often the conversation begins before work or after work and usually while running, or sometimes while stretching after running, and maybe on the phone. The sentiment is often shared: That thing we talked about was cool. Write it down. What’s next? Work — or if it’s the evening — sleep. When will we get to it? At some point.

I miss walking down the hall and spending all night talking about Nietzsche, playing Mario Kart, or deciding that we absolutely without a doubt must go sledding on the golf course right now.

At the same time, when I think about ‘going back,’ I couldn’t, and I don’t think I’d want to. My college experience was special largely because of the time in my life it took place and the people in my life I shared it with. I couldn’t recreate it—not piece for piece anyway. And that’s okay.

That said, I did go back for Homecoming It was nice

As I progress into the next stage of my life, I recognize the tradeoffs. I’m gaining the satisfaction of self-sufficiency and the comfort of stable patterns. I’m learning to love the little differences I’m noticing in my day-to-day life, details I wouldn't notice if not for the structure of my Monday-through-Friday. Those little differences,** those deviations from the mean, are important: Recently and after many conversations, I concluded that they make life feel interesting. Why did my past year feel so interesting? Because many things in it were different. Why did I consider walking around Barcelona, or Rome, or Paris interesting? Because I noticed the cultural, architectural, and climactic differences (as well as the differencs taking place in me, in my worldview, identity, etc). And if I noticed those differences there, shouldn’t I be able to notice them walking around Arlington, Virginia? Granted, they may not be as pronounced, but insofar as no two places, people, or things are ever truly the same, with cultivated perception we ought to be able to spot the differences, and learn from them.

What makes our lives interesting is as much what we experience as how we choose to experience it. With that in mind, I plan to relish differences big and small in 2020 and celebrate newness when I can. So, too, do I plan to revel in sameness, soak up the excellence of repetition, and find joy in that which remains—mostly—unchanged.

*A friend of mine (hi Elias) recently pointed out that with anything interesting, the reference frame matters. “Interesting to whom?” is an important question. Tacitly, and for the sake of this essay, I answered the question “interesting to whom” as “to me,” but I’m curious: What was the most interesting year of your life to you? What was the most interesting year of your life to somebody else? Are they different years?

**As much as differences (newness) can make life interesting, so too can similarities (sameness), but in my opinion the similarities we find interesting are often the ones we don’t expect (i.e. finding out you have something unexpected in common with someone) and insofar as they are unexpected, those instances of similarity (sameness) are also instances of newness.