Creating the future

A couple of weeks ago Linda and I sat at our kitchen table after breakfast and talked about the future. Our future as a couple, our future as individuals, and of course the farms future. What did we want our lives to look like in five years? We will both be 50. We didn’t have a crystal ball to look into, but we both seemed pretty clear that we would be happy and we would be healthy, I know, how cliché. But aside from that, how? So we took a piece of paper out and wrote down what we wanted our life to be like in five years. What would it include; professionally and personally, business and pleasure? We sat there for about 3 hours writing about our life 5 years from now.

For the past umpteen years I have lived and created my life from one year to the next or better one season to the next. I don’t know that there has ever been a time I have looked ahead five years. That’s just me. Part of it I’m sure has been I really doubted I would survive the next five years and that’s just me too. (I’ve had a slightly dark and jaded past and that’s all I’m gonna say). But for the first time in my life the future seems worth planning. I’m done with just surviving. I’m done with just getting through it. I do believe, surviving and getting through some hard times has helped to lift me up, and has given me the confidence to think about the future with excitement and joy rather than insecurity and dread.

I owe a lot of this to having such an amazing and supportive partner. It’s funny what happens when you meet someone who truly inspires you. And it’s even funnier when it works both ways and neither one of you can figure out how and why but it just is and we just do and that’s just it.
So this session we had planning what 50 would look like seemed to help give clarity to what 45 and 46 and 47 and so on would look like. So it’s like we’re working our way backward. But everything and all the decisions we make along the path hopefully will align and further our goals of how we see our future selves. We looked at it like a road map, there will be detours and road blocks, planned or unplanned but the destination probably won’t change. Healthy and happy. Broad, I know. But that’s the beauty and the gift we have by growing up, getting older is it doesn’t have to be complicated.

I’m under the impression that things can only get better and by god so far they have by light years. But let’s get back to the future; the one thing that inspires me most about the future is this very moment I am in right now, because without this there would be no future. Now if that’s not a cliché it should be. There’s no better time like the present. How’s that?

So this coming year and the next I have goals, I have a plan. It feels good. It feels attainable. I still have a little voice in the back of my head that tells me to prepare for the worst and I’m finally starting to shut that voice down more and more. And believe me it’s not happy about it! but, at some point I realize I need to be spending time preparing for all of the good things to come too. Maybe this is my own Advent. Preparing for the coming of my own birth, and the good that could come of it.