Hyperlexia

The future sounds intimidating. It gives us the feeling that things that will come are inevitable, and that we cannot do anything to avoid what will happen. The thought makes us incapable of manipulating the upcoming events. We cannot see it, but we know that sooner or later, time will run out and everything will just hit us where Fate has intended it to.

So, how do we prepare for the future?

People plan things. We expect something far ahead. For example, we go to school to learn. Learning is a part of planning for the years to come. Then we dream. As a child we imagine ourselves working as professionals. We move on, grow up, and dream some more. We see ourselves ending up with the one we met in high school, stay together until college, work in a company, then get married and have a family. It is a typical “I want a sort-of happy ending-like” story. Then time will pass by, and as we grow older, some fantasies that we assembled years earlier will break into fragments – pieces that we cannot put together anymore.

Some of us wonder why that as the years go by, we cannot get the things that we want – they do not happen. Then we speculate. We think why certain matters are not happening; why it does not work. We planned, right? We knew that everything is going to be okay. Unfortunately, something went wrong. As we go on, we now look at the past and the present, and then we will realize that looking far ahead is not enough. Maybe it’s the lack of preparation, or motivation. Say, we didn’t study enough, so instead of finishing school earlier we might have to spend a little more time at school. Maybe because something went wrong around us that we forgot to consider them while we were deliberating on certain matters. We cannot prevent flaws, but we can somehow avoid them, or lessen their impact on our lives.

What we had in the past affects what we have right now, and what we have right now determines what will happen in the future. It is all interconnected. We made mistakes in the past, and we should have “jotted” some notes in our minds so that we can avoid those lapses in the present. Then we pick up the portions of yesterday, keep the lessons that we learned, and live for today. We know that we are wiser now. We can still make mistakes, but we have room for those. We can learn from such inaccuracies. We become brave and strong, and ready to try new waters. It could be the same depth as before; it could be not. Things will go on like that, yet sooner or later we will realize that we have already built a new image – the pieces might have come from different puzzles, but still, we created a whole new picture. We will then smile to ourselves and think that this is what we have planned for. It is not that perfect, but we are happy, and other people are happy. That’s what matters.

What we are today influences tomorrow; and the best way to plan things carefully is to start now.

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Originally posted at Peyups, under the column, The Ampersand.