The fourth is strong in you

I thought I had reached port, but I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea. — Deleuze and Guattari, after Liebniz

I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure. — Unknown

When 2007 rolled in, I was bright and optimistic. This was the year I would get a new job, pay off my credit card debt, find stability, and start living the life I was meant to. Now 2008 is around the corner, and at 28, I’m still stuck with the same job, have doubled my debt, broken up from a significant long-term relationship, and consider Gossip Girl the ultimate reward of the week. During the year, in the midst of one of my many confused and questioning states, I was introduced to the Saturn Returns concept by people who claimed to have survived through it. It’s a planetary, astrological phenomenon that supposedly begins when you’re 27 and ends when you reach your 30’s, signaling a period of tumultuous change and painful growth. It’s the Hurricane Katrina of personal development, and as musical proof, many rock stars have died or killed themselves at 27. Kurt Cobain wrote, at the time of his offing, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” quoting Neil Young. That the word “nirvana” in Sanskrit literally means “blown out, extinguished” makes his shotgun-to-the-head all the more poetic, but Kurt followed the pain-numbing methods of smack and not those of Buddha, so we needn’t read too much into it. Except that he didn’t live through this.

Some pragmatic or marketing-minded person has buzz-phrased this phase as the “quarter-life crisis,” the post-college period of existential angst when we question who we are and what we are meant to do in life. While it has become almost a cliché or a copout for what seems like irresponsible slacking off (oh, you adults), it is a social and economic reality particular to recent generations who have come of age after the ’60s. It is also a profound spiritual necessity, I believe: a time of exploration and discovery, of stillness and turmoil, of journeying and coming back home.

New York Times columnist David Brooks spins it as the “odyssey years,” a term which more accurately reflects the meandering ways and strange bypaths youths take on their road to adulthood. Like the archetypical hero’s journey, it is the tour of duty that begins with the call to adventure and is defined through the crossing of thresholds. Our parents, God bless them, are naturally horrified: “These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed,” Brooks writes.

Yes, delayed. Marriage, kids, even a permanent career are still far off my radar. One day, I’m contemplating going back to school, maybe start a collection of frivolous masters degrees. The next day, teaching English in the jungles of Costa Rica sounds attractive. Still the next gets me excited at the idea of leaving behind the rat race of New York, absconding off to Boracay to write a novel and tan like I mean it.

This is less a sign of a lack of fortitude than an improvisational response to modern conditions. The world is uncertain, the economy is oftentimes bleak, and yet we’re also faced with such a diversity of choices and options and modes for living. The rules our parents lived by hardly apply anymore.

But this in turn opens us up to the world. I trust less those who seem to be sure of their life path at 23 than my fellow Saturn Returnees who are shopping for careers, shuffling around relationships, switching homes and shifting countries — who don’t know what to do next, because they want to do everything.

While affinities to old institutions are breaking down, new social ones are beginning to have more importance in our lives. Facebook is just one of the ways we’re connecting with each other on an increasingly complex and virtual realm. Some people think social networking is a sorrowfully shallow substitute for human interaction and immersion in “real” life, and cannot comprehend the delicate skill involved in navigating relationship status updates, which have been known to actually make or break the relationship. Rather than taking away, it’s added another dimension to our lives. Through the FB, I have become better “real” friends with people who would have been just passing acquaintances, or blips on my newsfeed.

The dramatic possibilities of online life, real life and quarter life converge in a new Internet series called “Quarterlife,” produced by the same prescient folks who gave us the brilliant but prematurely aborted high school TV show, My So-Called Life. Now I have always identified with Angela Chase (Claire Danes), who was quite gawkish but seemed to have some unknown higher calling, even if it was just to make out with Jordan Catalano. The creators Herskowitz and Zwick, after a quibble with the TV networks, reformatted their show for the Internet, its more appropriate and relevant home. Dylan, the main character, is a frustrated writer who feels she has sold out by working at a women’s magazine. Her friends are all similarly unbelievably good looking artiste types, like film school grads with hot bodies and ever-present MacBooks. Dylan starts an online video blog detailing their lives, or rather how they’re figuring them out, on the website quarterlife.com which, incidentally, is also a real social networking site for 20-something artiste types. Such genius!

Speaking of chronicling one’s personal torment, I unearthed my diaries from when I was 22. Thankfully these were never meant to be broadcast as I was always inebriated when writing. I cringed, but only because I haven’t changed much — there was much prattle about consciousness of self, questions of identity, and issues concerning the veracity of text message relationships (I actually spent several stomach-churning sentences trying to decipher what “mis Ü” could have meant). However, there was one idea that kept repeating itself throughout the entries, almost like my mantra, and it was this: “Every moment is new and unique. Every moment is becoming.”

Those sentences I shall take back with me as I hustle in the new year, facing possible unemployment, homelessness, aloneness, etc. Yet not all of my resolutions from the past year have remained unresolved, and I’ll take that as a sign: as part of my yoga practice, I had promised myself that I’d be able to come up into a headstand before the year ends. I was beginning to think it was never going to happen. But just a few days ago, after numerous attempts at lifting and crashing and kicking and yowling, there was A Moment, and I finally achieved balance. I stood on my head, and I saw the world in a different way.