Our Futures Are Not Guaranteed

Recently I was sitting by Smith River in Oregon pondering on the getting older bit and the future we all paint in our minds.  Not one of us knows for sure how our story ends, and I suspect all of us carry around a draft version of it, the story we tell ourselves about what the future holds.  The picture of who will be chasing who in their wheelchairs.  What holidays and special occasions will look like.  Who we’ll call when something amazing happens, and who we’ll call when something goes straight to shit.  These are not things we generally write down.  Most of the time, I don’t even think we are aware we’re making them.  They are just there, below the surface, quietly becoming part of how we think the future will work.

Losing my Beautiful Bride shattered a lot of assumptions I held as unassailable truths.  The obvious one was losing her.  The less obvious one was losing the future I had built in my head around her being there for it.  I am not typing about some detailed 20 year plan backed up with a strategy document.  We didn’t have that, most folks don’t have that.  And if they do, I am questioning the sanity of that.  If we were to boil our plan all the way down to its essence, we simply had the expectation that whatever came next, we’d figure out that shit together, just like we figured everything else out.

I am realizing I not grieving a future that has been taken away from me.  I am grieving a future that never actually existed outside my own damn head.  Talk about getting stuck in your head, holy shit, what a realization.  The point being, all futures are imaginary, until they get here.  We cannot know what tomorrow will bring.  Hell, we can’t really even know what the next hour or next few minutes brings.  The strange thing is that most of us understand that intellectually and then proceed like it isn’t true.  A classic case of ostrich with its head in the sand.

We all make plans.   We tell ourselves story after story about how things are going to play out.  We picture retirement.  We picture anniversaries.  We picture who will be beside us when all of our hair is gone and strange noises start happening every time we get up.  And we picture all sorts of things that have yet to happen.  And none of that is wrong.  I think it is just part of being human.  We are wired to imagine what could be or will be. 

Maybe starting with possibilities is what all of us do.  Then slowly, over years and decades, they stop feeling like possibilities and start feeling like how the story is supposed to go.  Right up until life hits us with a harsh reality check.  Somewhere along the way, I quit thinking of my future with Sandy as one possible version of our story and started thinking it was the story.  That is a hell of thing to realize.  And once I saw that, I started wondering where else have I done the same thing.  Turns out, there are probably more places than I care to admit and that feels like something to work on. 

Over the last few months, I’ve started to suspect this isn’t just a widowhood lesson.  That happens to be how I learned it, but I don’t think it has exclusive rights to that.  I guess eventually everyone discovers they have been carrying around in their head a future that just doesn’t’ ever show up.  Sometimes that could be a marriage that didn’t work.  Sometimes it’s a stalled career or a dream that never materializes.  Sometimes it could be a dream that turns out to look nothing like the mental picture you’ve been carrying around.  Life is like an editor, always tinkering with the manuscript, without asking permission or even letting us know about the changes.

Sitting beside Smith River, I found myself wondering if maybe wisdom has less to do with predicting the future and more to do with holding it lightly.  We can dream about it, plan for it, even hope for it.  We just cannot confuse it with a promise.  Tomorrow is never a signed contract for any of us.  Losing someone teaches that lesson in the harshest way possible.   For a long time that realization felt depressing.  If the future isn’t guaranteed, if the story in my head isn’t necessarily the story I am going to get, what am I supposed to do with that?

The more I pondered, the more I started to wonder if maybe the answer wasn’t to stop dreaming about tomorrow.  The answer might just be as simple as not treating those dreams like they are a certainty.  The future I imagined with Sandy was one I looked forward to.  I still miss it and I probably always will.  At the same time, sitting there listening to the water go by, I can see something I couldn’t see years ago.  Just because that future never arrived doesn’t mean there aren’t other futures that are simply waiting for me to arrive in them.  Different ones, unexpected ones, and futures I can’t even imagine because they haven’t rolled into view, yet. 

And maybe that is where the lesson has been hiding.  We are supposed to make plans, we are built to be dreamers.  We were supposed to draw a picture of what might be waiting around the next corner.  We just have to remember that those pictures are sketches, not blueprints.  The future has never been guaranteed to any of us.  And maybe, just maybe, that isn’t a reason to fear what’s next, even when we have NO FUCKING IDEA what it might be.

Maybe we just have to be courageous enough to stay curious as hell about it.