Didn't see that one coming...

I will turn 50 in 19 months, comfortably middle-aged.  You'd think that I would have acquired a least an ounce of wisdom or foresight to this point, but no.  Several times this year I have been stunned.  There was the day that I found out my parents are moving away from my childhood home (5 miles away, but still).  And then yesterday an old friend told me that he was doing something I never thought he'd do.

It's not that either of these occurrences are bad things, mind you.  For both my parents these changes in their lives are a blessing.  It's just that they hit me out of nowhere; when my friend called me last night to tell his news, I was driving and thought for a moment that I would run into a lightpole.

Maybe it's a good thing that we often are surprised, because in this era in which almost anything is available in seconds online, real life isn't quite as predictable.  We need a few shocks along the way, I guess.  We get to see that we aren't nearly as wise, brilliant, or knowledgeable as we think we are.

And so life is meant to be surprising.  If someone as bizarre as a pudgy unknown Korean singer can appear out of nowhere and make in 2012 the most watched video ever, then what the heck do any of us really know?