Would You Like to Know the Future?

Twenty-five years ago I was lying in hospital room in Santa Monica, California, with my brand-new baby daughter.
It was stunning. I’d never thought about becoming a mother. Wasn’t in my cards, I thought. Yet here was a perfectly formed little human being, looking with those deeply concentrating eyes into my own as if I were some wonderful sight. I held her, she was mine, we were a new team. I had a great career. Now I had a baby daughter. Ah. How…?

Now I’m thankful I couldn’t see into the future. When I say that, I picture being told the events that would transpire in the next 25 years. What if someone had told me what would happen in my future when I was 25, like my daughter is now? This will happen, that will happen. Just the events only; not my inner life, not my emotional state.

It might look something like this: Your marriage will fail. Your father will die soon. Your child’s father will give you the boot. You’ll spend years alone. You’ll become an alcoholic. You’ll go on the wagon, marry a truck driver, get the boot from a wonderful job. You’ll live through a massive earthquake. Your best friend will die. Then your next best friend too. Your mother will get Alzheimer’s and lose everything in her mind, and then she’ll die. You’ll get pneumonia, and then…

Hey! What happened to “happily ever after”? The trouble with just knowing the events is that they don’t explain what happens inside you when they happen to you. The litany of stuff sounds frightening. If I had known what my future held, I might have simply adopted a dog and hidden from life.

But the events came and I adapted. Not knowing what lay ahead, I just kept getting up every morning. Hard times mellowed out. Good times came. They didn’t look eventful and probably wouldn’t have made the list of milestones. “You’ll go to the mountains and make snow angels with your daughter and laugh your head off and remember it for the rest of your life.” Would a crystal ball have told me that? “Many times you’ll look at your life and thank God for everything.” Would it have told me that?

I don’t want to know the future. I’ve heard it said that with one foot in the future and one foot in the past, you piss on the present. I like the present just fine. I imagine that I’ll be equipped, I’ll find the inner resources and outer resources to cope, when whatever lies ahead comes to pass, just as I have in the past. The worst happens, you think, and it doesn’t kill you. It does seem to make you stronger.

I like the photo I used for this post. As a marching band came up the street toward me at a Christmas light parade last weekend, I opened the shutter of my camera and exposed the picture until they marched past me. To me, the photo captures what the future looks like as it arrives: something beautiful, if you look at it in the right light.