Janice and I are flying out tomorrow morning to Hawaiian island of Kauai, where on Saturday afternoon we’ll be holding our wedding ceremony with our families and friends.

For the most part, everything has been arranged and planned, mostly thanks to Janice’s efforts, so I have little trepidation about the upcoming nuptials. It also helps that ours will be a very small ceremony, so there’s no pressure for us to pull off some sort of major production.

Janice has once and again asked me if I’d ever dreamt of getting married and what my wedding would be like, to which my answer has been a rather vexing (to her) “no”. Maybe it’s one of those “gender gap” things but I’d never really given the wedding itself much thought. It’s made planning the details a bit easier, I suppose, because we’ve had few if any contentious issues about various details of the event.

All in all, I think that the biggest reason that I feel totally relaxed about the wedding, marriage and all that is something that I’ve come increasingly to realize: life rarely unfolds the way one expects or plans. Rather than straining to wrestle our destinies with an iron grip, I think it’s best to steer from far upstream as best we can, see how things actually turn out and adjust accordingly.

I realize of course that I’ve lived a relatively charmed life, fairly free of truly trying tests, so it remains to be seen how my philosophy will hold up in the face of adversity. One thing that has changed over the recent past is that I now have someone by my side to help me meet those challenges, come what may.

In my relatively short time here on Earth there have been a few events that may in the long run punctuate the history of our civilization… but I’ll be darned if I was actually able to witness any of them, by live broadcast if not in person.

Case and point: The Challenger accident occurred while I was in class, and as I was in Canada we weren’t tuned in to the event as apparently many American schools were. The September 11 attacks had all taken place by the time I woke up.

The bulk of western civilization, it seems, lies in a span of time zones that seemingly increases the probability of noteworthy events happening while I, here in Pacific Time, am in bed asleep. As a matter of practice, one of the first things I do after waking up in the morning is checking the news on the BBC, CBC and CNN web sites, as a quick check that the world hasn’t changed in some drastic way in the previous few hours.

Of course there are plenty of other events that have occurred while I was fully aware, but they tend not to be singular moments. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami may have been (to a degree) a pinpoint in time, but its far-reaching effects took some time to become known. The fall of the Berlin Wall may be considered an “event” but it didn’t occur all at once, certainly not in the literal sense.

Only time will really tell how “monumental” tomorrow’s inauguration will be… But at least this time I might wake up on time to see it, if my alarm clock doesn’t fail me.

With our parents fully informed I’m finally able to lift the news embargo: Janice and I got engaged on Thanksgiving Day this past November.

Happy New Year everybody.