Looking Ahead

 

*Originally posted on 02.23.2018 on a different blog site.

So yesterday's post might have been seen as bleak or dark.  Okay, that could be accurate.  But it was also real and it told the truth.  But is that the whole truth?  Is aging mostly about being left behind?  This morning I find myself thinking about the other part of that seesaw.  If one is left behind, then what lies ahead?

One thing I know for sure is that life is unpredictable.  That's one of those things that I didn't solidly grasp until I was much older, until maybe after I had children and maybe even until after those children grew up and left.  Maybe that's when I finally realized that I couldn't predict what was going to happen.  Mostly I do believe I barreled through life, oddly checking off the to do lists of life. And, for the most part, things  unfolded the way they were supposed to. There were some surprises in my late teens and twenties but then I got married.  Pretty much after that it all was predictable.  There were a couple of deaths that were shocking and unpredicatble  and there were a couple of job related surprises but that's about it.  Everything else  played out pretty much as one might expect.

At some point though, I started to see that life is NOT predictable.  I came face to face with death again in shocking ways.  I had some personal challenges that were upsetting and yet introduced me to new sides of me.  I had health issues that I never expected would run my life for two years. There were political actions that stunned me and the rest of the world.  That was not the way it was supposed to go.  And the surprises, though largely not pleasant or easy, weren't all bad.  My children each went off to college but came back to town and settled down with people with whom they went to elementary school.  Who would have thought that the playmates from childhood would become my children's spouses?  One day on a whim, I went to a yoga class with a friend and now I know the benefits of a regular yoga practice.  It was a door I hadn't even see let alone thought of opening.  I've become a fan of Twitter and that has opened lots of doors for me.  I like the on line interactions and I like the connection to ideas and refections and cool videos/articles. Twitter turned out to be a surprise.  All of these turns of events made me stop and think about predictions. It was as if the clouds were starting to clear out and I could better see the blue sky of truth.  I could NOT know how things were going to go.  I could not guarantee that the day was going to play out as I imagined that it would.  I could not say with any certainty that today would be just a regular day.

The thing is that , once I was willing to see the unpredictability of life, I think I became more open to the idea.  Now I like that I don't know what's going to happen next in my world.  I can also see that what I might initially think of as a "bad" turn of events can, in fact, play out very differently.  If I can hold on to this truth, it could make a lot of difference in this whole aging part of life.  If I can stay open to possibility, if I can stay curious and receptive, well, who knows?  Life could end up being more exciting and more fulfilling that I ever thought it could be.