Maybe you remember the “Zoltar The Fortune Teller” booths from the 70’s that still exist in some arcades. The movie “Big” with Tom Hanks showcased a knockoff the original, with the same concept: feed the machine a coin and it tells your fortune.
Of course, no one can foresee the future, unless you believe your stockbroker or any of the talking heads on the financial cable channels. People are horrible at predicting the future. Look up. The Jetsons are not whizzing by in their flying saucers, decades after the cartoon’s demise. The moon hasn’t let orbit as offered on the sci fi serial Space 1999, and we don’t have those cool communicators from Star Trek (We have smart phones instead, and they haven’t exactly been a blessing.) In looking forward you’d have better luck with Zoltar if you asked me.
I don’t try to guess what the future might hold for myself a year out. As I get closer to life’s finish line, it would be presumptuous to even think about making grand plans. Heck, I don’t even buy green bananas.
I read somewhere that making long term plans is a thoroughly western cultural habit. (I encourage others to weigh in.) Are we in the West less likely to live in the moment, to practice “mindfulness”?
In my personal experience, the passage of time seems to accelerate with age, and I’ve begun to be more mindful because, and as Jack Nicholson’s character stated in Terms of Endearment, “There aren’t that many shopping days until Christmas.”
I try to live in the “now”. Life is happening now. I am here on a cliff, watching a hawk soar above a wilderness landscape.
I’m in the hammock, smelling the fresh cut grass, listening to the crickets. I am walking up an empty trail, watching the snow fall in complete silence.
Alan Saunders in 1957 wrote, “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” I bet he didn’t think John Lennon would make a slightly different iteration of the phrase famous decades later, nor could Lennon or any of us predict the ominous event that would take shatter his plans with an earlier than expected “appointment in Samarra”.
I don’t know what tomorrow holds for me, or care to guess. I’m not supposed to know. Not knowing is the beauty of life’s adventure. A year from now I’ll know, and it will be good to be here then.
An Unmapped Route: A Hiker's Blog 