A Woman With Too Much Future

I feel like a woman without a future.
Or more precisely, a woman with too many to count. 

I look at old Facebook photos, to see my life puttering out behind me. The smiling highway of used coffee grounds and emptied wine glasses. There are no photos of tomorrow for reassuring clarification.

If you could be anything, who would you be?
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

How brave would you be, really, faced with the infinite?

I drove to the Center and made an assessment. I had deposited my final check into my bank account. I nodded toward Bandit. "I have you," I said. "And this car. Those aren't nothing." He opened a single eye from his nap, and closed it again in response.

It feels like the most liberating moment of my life. Except when it feels like crushing pressure. Because there are no excuses left.

I think often of the things we don't think to be grateful for until they are missing. The way I never thought to say "Oh Bandit! How wonderful you can walk!" And then he couldn't. It's not that I'm hard on myself about it. I just think how impossible it would be to remember to be thankful for everything.

It would be like saying to the table I'm writing on "How nice, you are not broken!" Or "Hey left hand, I'm so grateful you don't yet have arthritis." "Right knee, how wonderful you've never needed replacement!" It would be hard to do that about everything, all the time. You could never get to it all.

I do my humble version. 
"The sky is beautiful. The mums have come in. I can smell fall."
"I'm so incredibly grateful to be here, right in this spot, right now."
 
Still, it must not be enough.

Everyone says there's no space in your head for anything else if you're expressing gratitude.
Forgive me for what must be my incredibly enormous skull.

***

I met a woman on a train in Austria this summer.
I messaged her the other night.
"How did you decide where to go? When you took a break from your life?" I asked.

I wanted reassurance.
 
She told me the names of blogs, offered her couch should I venture in her direction, told me I'd return a new person.
It was the last part I was listening for.

I'd like to meet her. This new person I will become.

I assume she's great. 

But it's like the Facebook photos. They only go backwards, and I live in perpetual curiosity and occasional fear. I wake up and say "show me yesterday. Where does this mean I am today?"

Actually, most days it takes me a moment to figure out where I am even waking up at all.

Perhaps I am using Facebook wrong.

But maybe I have misunderstood the endeavor.

Maybe I have misunderstood a very great deal, I quietly suggest to myself.

Maybe I have misunderstood a very great deal.

***

There is a deep humility in being a woman with a thousand futures.
Or in waking up at all.

May we all be worthy of our blessings, I say, before placing fresh sheets on a bed up here.
May we at least give it a heck of a try.

Namaste.