Looking to the Future

If you know me at all you know that I am a planner. I plan everything in my life. I sit with my calendar and write out everything that we have planned. I plan on how to spend money, I plan trips, I plan our weekend, our evenings. Everything.

I keep looking to the future excited for what is to come. But in the meantime I keep wishing away the days so that we can get to that future point. I could not wait for the day that I graduated high school, college or got married. Those days have all passed. And as we look to the future I want it to be time for Richard to graduate. I want his comps to be over. I want him to find a job. I want it to be February so that I can start over with planning our finances for the month. I want it to be time for all the trips we have planned this year.

I know that even if I make a plan that it is possible that it will change. That does not bother me. But I like to look into all the different possibilities of what may happen and plan accordingly. And if I know something is coming up then I like to plan it.

What really makes me crazy is that I have no idea what may happen in the next year. I know that Richard will be done with classes in November. That I know. But beyond that it is pretty much an open book. Are we going to stay put so he can finish his dissertation? Will he find a job that will require him to move? Will he find a job right away in November or will it be May before he finds a job? How long of a lease do we sign with our apartment complex? If he finds a job where will we move? New York? Dallas? Chicago? Minneapolis? I know where I would like to end up, but I don't know if it will happen.

I have no idea what it looks like and it depends on so many different scenarios that I cannot even try to predict what may happen. And I know I drive my husband crazy because I keep asking him what life may look like. And he does not know any better than I do. Or at least that is what he tells me. And since these are all such huge life events, I wish I could look into what to expect.

All of these things I cannot plan. And I think this fact makes me want to plan them even more. And it is making me feel like I need to plan more in general, but I have nothing left to plan. I keep trying to come up with new things to plan and I got nothing. And all of this gives me an itch to do something. Anything. So that I have something to fill my time. It just makes me feel like I need to get out and do something. But there is usually nothing to do.

I need to focus more on the now. Instead of trying to plan out what may happen in the next year, I need to live in what we are doing here and now. Because this season of our life will be over before we know it. I need to enjoy the friends we have made and the city we live in because we only have so much time left. And once we get to this future that I keep wishing for, I want to be able to look back and say I enjoyed the adventure. Life is already too short to constantly be looking into the future. So here's to me, as I try my hardest to stop planning out the future.