I take care, as my Japanese neighbours do, over my first thought, my first sentence, my first meal; the day itself is for me like the folded white paper that the Japanese collect from shrines outlining their future for the year to come. When, four years ago, New Year’s Day found me barrelling down a narrow mountain road at 12,000 feet in southern Bolivia and then bouncing and banging around as my taxi rolled over and over — the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel, a victim of New Year’s Eve — I had the distinct impression that the year that followed might not be entirely happy. (I survived with just a scar, though the driver and the only other passenger ended up in the hospital.)

But my most haunting New Year’s in recent times — walking through the Cambodian jungle at four in the morning, surrounded by Khmer Rouge ghosts and the towers of Angkor — taught me that the calendar’s arbitrary markings are really just asking you how much you define yourself by what’s shifting or what’s still.

This year, as it happens, I plan to mark the new year in California, wondering how much our fresh young president will draw on the ancestral wisdom of Kansas and Kenya to guide him — and us — into a new century. You don’t have to travel far, my Japanese neighbours remind me, to turn a new page in your life. The only important thing on New Year’s — I should have reminded my Bolivian taxi driver — is to wake up.