I think about the future a lot.
By that I mean, I try not to think about the future a lot.
By that I mean, if I think about the future too much I spiral out into an existential crisis.
People like to ask you about your future. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What are you doing this weekend?
My answer to these questions is usually, ‘I don’t know, whatever I feel like doing.’
I wish I was saying this because I am a totally free spirit who only lives in the present moment but I’m not. I’m scared to think I know what my future holds. If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that if you think you know what the future holds, you’re probably dead wrong.
So now I am afraid to know but I’m also afraid of not knowing. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer any of those questions.
I feel like I am in limbo. I don’t move forward or backward. I’m stuck.
I take the exact same road to get pretty much anywhere I need to go. I am usually focused on the road in front of me as I am a diligent and responsible driver.
There are mountains in every direction and on all sides of me. There are rolling hills, plateaus, giant crests in the distance. I see them everyday, they have blended into the overall landscape of my route to work.
Straight in front of me there is a massive mountain, like behemoth sized. It’s usually a giant grey geometric shape outlined on the horizon, it’s easy to forget it’s even there.
The other day I was driving to work and the sun hit in a way it hadn’t before and it was like I had never actually seen it before. It had always been right in front of me but that day, it was magic. It fucking ruled.
I sit in the exact same spot to see the stars a couple nights a week. Mainly because it’s spooky out here in the dark and it has the clearest view while also being close to my gate.
The Leonid meteor shower was last night so I went out to try and catch it before I went to bed. From my vantage point, I was looking up at Cassiopeia. When I went back out in the early morning, I was looking up at Gemini.
It wasn’t even a twelve hour difference.
I have a fun activity I do called ‘sun chasing’. This is where I go on all sides of the property, walk at different elevations and sit on different points of the fences to get the best view of the sunset or sunrise.
It’s a different spot every day. It’s also a different sky every day.
I have sat on those same fences while I waited for storms to roll in. I watched as the clouds moved in different directions, I felt the subtle shifts of the wind as it picked up strands of my hair. I tracked the first few raindrops in the distance to the downpour that came soon after.
I moved when I realized a metal fence wasn’t the smartest place to be sitting during a thunderstorm.
After a day and a half of rain, I watched teeny tiny little blades of grass grow up out of a bunch of old, dusty dirt. I wondered how long they had been sitting dormant, just waiting for the right opportunity.
They died, obviously, this is the desert, but that isn’t the point.
This time period of my life feels like I am standing still. It’s hard to track the passage of time here, there’s no seasons. I didn’t realize it was Halloween until I saw pictures of people carving pumpkins back home. I feel like life is moving forward everywhere else while I am floating along in an eternal summer.
Which isn’t the worst when it comes to hypothetical purgatories.
The days keep passing, they turn into months. I feel like I am wasting time. Like I need to be doing something. Getting out there and meeting someone so I could maybe get married and have a chance at having a baby before I turn 35. Or investing in this blog so it can be something more than a webpage I use to send my thoughts out into the ether. Or trying to learn enough about one thing enough to do something different with my career.
I could observe all of these things and conclude that I am stuck, I am standing in the same place while the world rotates and changes around me. Which would be a shitty metaphor and an even dumber science experiment.
I don’t know why I get all worked up about it. I don’t even know if I really want those things. If I did, I’d probably do something about it outside of randomly panicking about it every few days.
I’m not doing those things.
I’m watching storms roll in. I’m watching the sun rise and set. I am tracking the patterns the moon moves in as those days turn into months. I am watching as grass puts in a real valiant effort to grow out in the desert. I am watching as it dies too.
You don’t learn how to do all of these things without standing in the same place for awhile and letting the world move around you. So I guess it’s not a shitty metaphor at all.
Honestly, I guess most of the time I am just hanging out and doing whatever I feel like doing. And then I sit and listen to music while I write about it and send it off into the ether. Or I sit and write unhinged things I will never, ever send into the ether.
Oh, and I’m alive and actually living. I’m not grass in the desert. I don’t know what I am but I’m not that.
I take that back, I guess I am sitting dormant and waiting for that perfect opportunity to present itself so that’s not really a shitty metaphor either. I’m just not going to give it a solid effort only to watch myself die anymore.
When it comes to the future, I think I should just chill out. I think if I allow myself to move with the rotation of the earth, if I don’t try to cling to an idea, a space or a time, it’ll take me where I need to go.
Resisting it would literally be pointless anyway. I don’t control the damn earth.
I don’t know why I’m so worried about the future anyway.
I think one day I will be bopping along, the sun will hit something completely different and I’ll say ‘Oh! That’s exactly what I was looking for!’
The sky is different every single day. I don’t need to know what it will look like tomorrow, next week, or next year.
Thankfully, I have all this time to wait and see. Who knows, it might even rain.
Then it will be this grass’s time to shine, baby!
