View from the North 40: The event boundary you didn't know you needed

The annual build-up of anticipation for New Year’s Day is, I think, the clearest proof of mankind’s eternal, stalwart and irrational optimistic nature.

How many times have we said it or heard it: “Ugh, 2020 has been the worst. I can’t wait until it’s over.”

As if, at the stroke of midnight heralding in Jan. 1, 2021, we will pass through a portal into a modern realm that’s as happy as a nuclear family in a 1950s sitcom, or maybe we’ll skip-jump into a brighter timeline in the infinite universe. As if.

That’s a hard no with a full stop at the end.

I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer here. OK? I’m just looking at this realistically. I don’t want anyone greeting 2021 by marching with a lively step up to their 2020 wall calendar, ripping it off the wall and chucking it in the garbage, then tacking the 2021 calendar in its place with a whistle and a quick dusting with your fingers before skipping off into the future — only to find two weeks later that you’ve already failed all your resolutions, everybody “and I mean everybody is still just so stupid,” things are going wrong and, frankly, the whole crap situation of 2020 is hounding the heels of 2021. Odds are, it’ll happen.

All of that said, I’m 100 percent in favor of this irrationally optimistic hope in a brighter 2021. Really, I am.

Why? Good question, and I hate to admit this in public, but I am a closet optimist. I might expect the worst, but I always hope for the best. I do.

But also, scientifically speaking, when we transition to 2021, we really are going through a portal. How cool is that?

Sadly, it’s not a science-fiction portal into a brighter timeline or a “Beam me up, Scotty” portal to the Enterprise, but it’s a portal nonetheless. Or, in more scientific terms, it’s an event boundary.

An event boundary is a physical thing, a moment, a visual or sound clue, or a whatever that marks the end of one thing and the beginning of another. These are things like a doorway between one room and another, the drive home from work, a new image in a PowerPoint presentation, a change in tempo and tone in music, phrases like “And my second point is,” or the lines around linking panels in the daily comic strip.

Several studies have been done on event boundaries, but a 2014 study at University of Notre Dame showed that young and old people alike regularly get up, walk into another room and not remember why they went there. This is because walking through a doorway from one room to the next causes a memory disconnect. The study showed that doorways aren’t the only event boundaries. It also happened when they changed computer screen windows and made narrative-based event shifts.

What the researchers found was that not only do we remember more, but also we have better recall and understanding if we are presented the information across event boundaries. Right now, our event boundary is the change from 2020 to 2021.

If 2020 feels like your plane was shot down and you had trouble with the ejection seat until the last second so you got out and your parachute deployed, but you had a hard, tumbling landing in a location not of your choice — the local garbage dump — and now you have someone’s leftover spaghetti dangling from your hair as you trudge your way into 2021 dragging a parachute filled with fetid garbage, a broken couch, several electronic devices so old and busted even the dumpster divers didn’t want them, and a pile of something that you suspect might be a tire and used diapers that are all on fire and billowing black smoke, you should concentrate on the fact that everything’s going to be OK. It is.

You will remember more of and better understand those things that happen across the event boundary between two different years — and you will be a better person for it.

Beyond all the happy-happy of the New Year’s celebration, just keep the flame of that unreasonably positive attitude going to light your way forward, trudging from the mess, and you’ll do all right.

But take a pro-tip from me, go in a direction that keeps you upwind of that black smoke. You’ll feel better for it.

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Shout out to artist Carolyn Anderson at http://www.carolynanderson.com for the tip about event boundaries. It sometimes takes a village to raise an idea out of the dark void of nothingness from whence all my creative ideas emerge at [email protected].