“The future is called
‘perhaps’, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the
important thing is not to allow that to scare you.” – Tennessee Williams
I don’t believe in a single future.
I used to. We’re trained to. When I was a kid, I grew up
believing that life was a straight line, that we go from Point A to Point B to
Point C and it’s all very orderly, very neat: no muss, no fuss.
After all, how many times were we all asked that question: “what do you want to be
when you grow up?” As if we were supposed to know – as children – what our
future was supposed to hold for us. But they always expected an answer. And woe
be to the child who answered “I don’t know.” Oh! All those helpful suggestions, all those nagging follow-ups.
And then, if we changed our minds, we were…flighty. Flaky.
Indecisive. “But I thought you wanted to be a veterinarian?” Hello? I was eight
years old when I said that. Are you really going to hold me to what I said when
Grizzly Adams was playing on TV?
We grow up, we live, we exist, not in one straight line but more
in a series of “choose your own adventure” books. When we reach the end of our
present, our current chapter, so to speak, we stand in a Room with Many Doors.
Each door has a different future we could have. We always have so many options.
Will we like them all? No. Of course not. But they are all there. For us. So
many different paths we could choose. So many different decisions we could make.
So many ripples that will spread out from making a single choice.
My initial dream was to continue on for my doctoral degree
immediately following my master’s degree. I was accepted at several
institutions for this: Texas A&M, Yale, University of North Texas. But then
I found out I was expecting my first child and my entire world shifted. Suddenly,
I was spinning on a new axis. I was going to have a baby. This was a new dream.
A better dream. Something I didn’t know I wanted so much became what I wanted
the most. The future I had thought about for so long was changing. Without
knowing it, I had walked through a new door.
After I had my second child, Sam, I felt the bumps in the
universe beginning. My husband and I decided to divorce a few months after Sam’s
birth. A few weeks after that decision was made, my son died in his sleep.
Suddenly, I had no future. It was gone. Wiped away. At least, that’s how it
felt.
It was – most definitely – the end of my present. Every. single.
day I made the conscious choice to walk back into the Room with Many Doors and,
once again, chose to enter into the future. Every day I did that. After a
while, I didn’t have to remind myself to do it. After a while, I didn’t have to
tell myself to keep breathing.
We like to plan our future. It’s great to plan, to be
prepared. It’s also important to know that plans don’t always work out the way
you think they will. Sometimes the plan goes scarily, horrifyingly awry.
Because your plan? Your original plan? That was only one possible future for
you. I married the love of my life in 2004. It wasn’t part of the plan for him
to die in 2005, but he did.
The future I planned changed. I didn’t give it permission to
do that, and it changed anyway. So I was at the end of my present – again – and
back in my Room with Many Doors. I had to walk through another door and into
another future.
Life is not linear. The future offers us many chances, many
options. When one doesn’t work out the way we planned, or the way we want it
to, we have the chance to walk through another door. Too often, though, we
become so attached to the picture we form in our head of what the future is supposed to look like that we find
ourselves paralyzed when confronted with the need to change the image.
We have to remember that the future we plan is but one
version of ourselves. Often we won’t know what other versions we are capable of
until we are standing in the Room with Many Doors. We won’t know until the next
door swings open.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep the comment forum positive, please. Comments written to abuse, embarrass, shame, mock, or taunt will be removed. This is my Queendom and I'm allowed to have it my way.