In four more days it will be my birthday.  Not a stellar one but, nevertheless, it marks the end of yet another year and the beginning of the next. Even though I have lived ‘quite-a-many’ it’s still a stretch for me to think that celebrating number 81 will really mark that number of years that I have lived and breathed and that the following day I begin on 82.

As always, I am looking back on what I accomplished this year.   Pretty much nothing.  I had plans to finish up my House Inventory Project, do a re-write of my book about Willard, and get the first draft of a new book underway.  I dinked around with all of those things but there was no finishing up, no closure.  In my mind, it was a Dink Year – sort of the octogenarian equivalent of a young person’s ‘gap year.’

I think those gap years are supposed to be a positive thing – an opportunity for a high school graduate, for instance, to ‘find’ himself.  Actually, that’s how lots of us perceived the purpose of our college years when I was coming up.  Now, though, the Gap Year has become a Big Deal. But I often wonder why big sighs accompany parents’ remarks about the status of their Gappers.  Is such a year really helpful?

The Gap Year concept began in the United Kingdom in the 1970s as a way to fill the seven or eight month gap between final exams and the beginning of university. The intention in the UK was for that time to contribute to the development of the student usually through an extended international experience.  It shouldn’t be surprising that when the Gap idea arrived in the United States twenty years later, it took on a life of its own.  We Americans have a way of putting ever good idea on steroids.

Here, the Gap Year embodies every manner of program and opportunity imaginable, both domestically and internationally, all with the shared purpose of “increasing self-awareness, learning about different cultural perspectives, and experimenting with future careers.”  I’ve also heard that they serve to “mitigate a sense of academic burnout” – another new age concept that takes the place of the “suck it up and get a job” attitude parents had back in my day.

I don’t know if most young people view their Gap Years as successful.  On the plus side, when you are just flirting with your twenties, you can probably afford a year to take a break.  Not so much at my end of the spectrum.  I wish I could look back at my Dink Year as a good thing instead of a year of wheel-spinning and time-wasting.

On the other hand, I have four more days to finish up SOMEthing.  I wonder if reading a good book (instead of writing one) would count.