As soon as I was old enough to realize how close we were to the end of the millennium, I figured out how old I would be on New Year's Eve, 1999. As a ten-year-old, I had definite ideas about what my life would look like at the end of the millennium.

I looked at my mother. She was only a little older then than I would be in the year 2000. How closely would my life at 34 resemble hers? I would be married of course; I had already decided that 27 would be the age I would finally accept one of the many proposals I would surely have to choose from. I probably wouldn't have four children, like my mother had. Three seemed a more sophisticated number. I would have an important and interesting job, even if I was still vague about the details of such a career, perhaps something in science, or singing. My husband would be tall and have thick black hair. He would be a good swimmer. (At ten this was the most appealing quality a boy could possess.)

I remember being relieved that at 34 I wouldn't be too over the hill to flee on foot if the World began to collapse. A teacher at Catholic school was uneasy about the advent of the year 2000 and passed that fear onto us.

So here it is mere days left until 2000 AD. I am not the only one who, as a child, imagined what life would be like at this time. Friends tell me they assumed they would be parents, or doctors, or famous by the end of the millennium. Perhaps this New Year's Eve, people are not so much looking to what the next year will bring, but adding up goals that have not been met, evaluating lives that failed to follow a plan.

I am not married. I realized long ago that it takes more than a strong breaststroke to make a good mate. It has taken me this long to have a good relationship. I do not have one child, let alone three, and I realize that particular window of opportunity is narrowing year by year. I have a job. I have an education. But honestly I am still searching for what I want to do. So if my actual life in no way resembles the childhood picture of my life, why am I so happy?

I decided that not following a plan is a good way to live. I have done many things my ten-year-old self would never have even imagined. I emigrated. I learned to ride a motorcycle. I took my time and found a good man who is kind and makes me laugh. I paint and write, and don't worry too much about a career.

I assumed my life would look a certain way by now, and admittedly in my twenties it worried me that I was straying from some ill-defined life goal. But I have decided that the gift of my thirties is the realization that nothing is as important as friends and love and laughter, and time well spent. And nothing is as freeing as the recognition that life is too rich to follow a plan.