... My Future?
Do you ever wonder, amidst worry about today and tomorrow and the rest of your life, how much longer you might have? What if the rest of your life is all of next week? Or next month? Next year? What if (God forbid) all we have is tomorrow?
In my senior year of high school, someone wrote in the yearbook, "Party forever! You can sleep when you're dead."
For those who may find this a rather impractical (if exciting)
modus operandi, someone else wrote in the same yearbook, "Dream as if you'll live forever; live as if you'll die tomorrow."
What if?
What if you were to die today, unexpectedly, without warning: no last confessions, no good-byes, no more chances to tell your mom "I love you."
Think about that for a moment.
What would be left undone, unsaid? What did you never get around to doing?
I have plans for the future. But really, each moment is up in the air until it has passed. Maybe I should say that I have
hopes for the future. That may be a more realistic statement.
In the end, I suppose, I will consider my life to have been successful if I was loved and will be missed, and if the people I love know that I love them.
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Labels: my future, philosophy, ponderings
Soccer Moms and My Future?
Sometimes I imagine what motherhood will be like. I have these scenes in my head of getting up in the morning, making sure my kids have their homework together, getting their lunches ready to bring to school, packing them into the car and seeing them off; scenes of family board games after dinner, of parents and kids all crammed together on the couch to watch a movie. I even see myself cleaning the kitchen in the middle of the day, doing laundry, picking the kids up from practice.
I want to be a soccer mom, in the most general sense of the term: not necessarily a mother of soccer players, or even of athletes (though that would be a plus), but my kids will play an instrument, or play a sport, or take ballet, or sing in the school choir, or something. And I will go to every recital, every game, every concert.
There will be family picnics on weekends; Sunday visits to the grandparents; bedtime stories; cookie-baking lessons in the kitchen degenerating into cookie dough feasts; trips to museums: things that families do.
I imagine all these things, and I have great hope in the future.
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Labels: imagine yourself here, my future
Recreational reading
Ooh, Friday the thirteenth.
Lovely connotations associated with this particular convergence of day and date.
(But that's not what I logged in to talk about.)
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I have been told that I have bizarre reading habits.
I tend to agree.
The list of my current non-fiction reading is as follows:
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach;
Advanced First Aid and Emergency Care, by the American National Red Cross;
Psychologist with a Gun, by Detective Harvey Scholssberg, Ph.D.;
Practical Psychology for Police Officers, by Martin Reiser, Ed.D.;
and
AOPA Air Safety Foundation Handbook for Pilots.
For the record: No, I don't have a pilot's license, and neither am I likely to get one in the near future. But for reasons unknown even to myself, I rather enjoy reading rules of air traffic control patterns, navigational signaling, and other such seemingly mundane and otherwise useless things. Neither am I likely to become a police officer, nor a psychologist.
You see my point.
What can I say? I'm into self-education. I have eclectic tastes.
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Labels: everyday
New beginnings?
And here we are at the onset of another year. The clocks have ticked over, the calendars are brand-new. Everyone talks about New Year's resolutions and a "fresh start for the new year." Really, what is New Year's Day but a marker along a long, continuing road?
2005, as years go, ran the board. It was astonishingly lousy, depressing, outrageously funny, and surprisingly pleasant, among other things, in turns. We had a death in the family, then a birth; I turned 21, attended a few weddings, had surgery, changed academic majors, failed some classes, aced others. Having come through all these things, I still have my close family and they still love me (go figure); I have my health; I have good friends; I have my faith. Life is not bad. And onwards, hopefully upwards, things continue; and the earth keeps right on spinning.
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Labels: philosophy, ponderings
