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Appointments with destiny

Just before the New Year begins, I always go to the office superstore to buy an appointment book for the year ahead. It can’t be put off any longer.

I don’t know if “appointment book” is the right name for these things. Some are called agenda books, but I don’t have an agenda. They also masquerade as planners, diaries, and date books. They come in an extravagant variety of shapes, sizes, and formats. Some have aggressive, macho names like “action planner,” and others are designed to generate good feelings, with sentimental titles like Life, Love. Gratitude and Dreams, or for fitness enthusiasts who measure their days by miles run or painful exercises performed.

Considering how deeply we are in thrall to the health industry, I was surprised not to find any diaries featuring the symptom of the day or the disease of the month. The book I chose, a very plain, black, and ordinary week-by-week appointment book without a theme, is described (no doubt ironically) by its manufacturers as a “self-management system.” This makes me smile every time I look at it.

Simply buying an appointment book made out of paper marks me as a hopelessly out-of-date relic of the past, a walking memorial to Johannes Gutenberg. All the people looking at this display in the office superstore were senior citizens. Modern young people prefer miniature computers, with tiny screens the size of postage stamps, that keep all their plans and notes safe, unless and until the batteries run out. But a lot of us still prefer an old-fashioned date book to keep our lives in order.

These books are not exactly diaries because they record the future, not the past, or rather the past of the future. They tell the story of your life before it happened. But they serve some of the functions of a diary. It’s good to know that at least we intended to do all those things, even if we can’t remember actually doing them.

Some people plan their lives years ahead. Like the old Soviet Union, they have five-year plans and ten-year plans. But I believe that personal long-term plans are a waste of time. Governments and symphony orchestras may be able to schedule things years ahead, but individuals are at the mercy of fate. I prefer to organize my future one day at a time, or at the most, one week at a time. It seems excessively optimistic to do more. The older I get, the more I would appreciate a six-month appointment book at half the price.

A new appointment book, however modest, is like a Pandora’s Box in reverse. It starts out empty and harmless, but as time goes by, it becomes full and intimidating and threatens to take over your life. Next year’s decisions come rushing in, long before we’re ready to think seriously about them. Why not fill up some of those blank dates? Why not accept the invitations, commitments, deadlines and travel opportunities that are already on the horizon for 2025? It’s easy to just jot the dates down. They don’t seem real, but they will!

So the years fill up with one undisciplined decision after another. An appointment book is like a temporal credit card, with which we spend the days of our lives before they have even arrived, but there’s no escaping the payment when it falls due.

David began as a print journalist in London and taught at a British university for almost 20 years. He joined WSHU as a weekly commentator in 1992, becoming host of Sunday Matinee in 1996.