One month later
It’s been a month since I turned 20 years old, but I feel like I am still treading on unchartered waters. Every single day, apart from my usual musings on love (or the lack of it), I’ve been thinking about life a lot. It’s an indelible mark my mind wanders to like it’s some sort of hobby or past time.
When I think about life, I mostly picture the future. And I’m scared half of the time whenever I do. It’s just that except for Nostradamus and the Mayans and (probably) other phonies who can see the future, nobody has ever gone there before. At least for Heaven and Hell, we have a little bit of an idea on how things will look like, based on the Bible and expository accounts of a few special people (who are also probably phonies) who claim to have gone there. But for the future? Nada. Zilch. We have science fiction to tease our imagination, but that’s not the kind of future I’m referring about.
I’m talking about our future – how our lives will turn out 10 or 20 years from now when the decisions and calculated risks we took in the present have gone into full fruition.
When I was in grade school, this future seemed so far away. It didn’t feel like it would ever come. It was so foreign to me that I lived with an obscured concept of it. Life was just one continuous cycle of day and night and lunch boxes and spelling bees. The next day felt like the other day.
Growing up has changed everything. It has made the future more real. With every year that I turn older, the future draws closer and the more I realize that it is apparently not covered in shiny wrapping paper. It’s uncertain, nevertheless exhilarating, and painted with hazy shades of grey areas and question marks.
In the past month, I’ve been looking at my parents in a different light. I look at them the way an apprentice would look at his master – so full of respect for “making it” in life. They live, thrive and exist in their futures with content and accomplishment. They have gone through this terrible stage of pre-future blues and figured out the biggest question on earth - what they want to do in life. Now, with figurative medals hanging around their necks, they just sit back and look at us from the comforts of the finish lines of their futures, and see how the that same scary, uncertain thing would unravel for us.
I wish they made handbooks for the future. But that would be too much of a giveaway and it would render us, pre-future beings, as cowards and scaredy-cats. I guess after all this overthinking and rambling about life and the future, the proper way to end it is not a statement of escapism and futile wishful-thinking, but a declaration of a rational and brave state of mind – must be an adult.
