“When I grow up, I will have a house by the sea, in a country where it is not cold.”
That’s what I’ve been thinking for a long time. That’s because I don’t like the cold, I’m fascinated by the sea (although I don’t swim, I don’t sit in the sun) and I’ve always dreamed of all sorts of things.
When I grow up… a kind of promise made to me for a future that I kept postponing. This is not the only one, I have a few more.
We often promise ourselves that later, somewhere, sometime, the life we want will begin. Until then, however, we are preparing. All kinds of challenges arise in the preparation process: a new job, changes to the existing job, marriage, divorce, postgraduate studies, a parent who needs more care or others.
After all this, however, we are going to fulfill what we set out to do. But there are other challenges, there are others to solve.
Until, one day, we realize that, in fact, life was everything that happened as we prepared for an imagined future. All the small and big joys, all the sorrows, all the ups and downs, achievements or failures, were our life.
I know, it’s a commonplace, we all know these things. But perhaps I am the last Mohican to think that ‘when…’ will do a lot big and small, forgetting that, in fact, until then, the present is as important as dreaming of a bright future.
Until that future, however, I think about getting out of my personal salt mine (as a friend tells me), so that I can see the sun from time to time.
What are you postponing for later?