In Which Piglet is Pensive but Present

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” - Albert Einstein

Above you see listed the only thing I can claim to have in common with Albert Einstein. I have never been a future-focused person. Rather, I should say I'm not a long-term-future-focused person. I can't ever remember setting goals either as a child or as an adult. It's hell for me every year at my job review to come up with tasks I plan to complete in the next year, simply because I feel more comfortable floating along day to day, keeping things moving.

I'm not proud of this...it can make it difficult for me to carry an information services "vision"...but it also means a lot less stress when it comes to self-examination. Am I where I thought I'd be when I graduated from college? Uh, sure. I had no idea where I'd end up, so this is just fine with me.

It also makes interacting with my baby daughter a bit more natural -- not to say easy -- than I'd guessed. J lives moment to moment, and doesn't even remember stuff as it happens (at least, that's my rudimentary understanding of her little synapses thus far). How beautiful! Every emotion she experiences is very pure and all-encompassing, and then it dissipates to be replaced by another.

Coupled with this tendency of mine, though, is an odd and contradictory behavior that often leads to utter paralysis. I am always waiting impatiently for things to end. As a youth, when we'd go on vacation, I'd be heavily concentrating on when the vacation was going to end. It didn't make me sad, or happy...I just thought about it. When I entered a party, I'd only be thinking of when I could leave, even if I was having fun. That sense of desired escape was underlying everything I did. It tore me away from the moment and prevented me -- prevents me -- from being fully present or engaged. It paralyzed me.

In a way I think it still does. I think about the end of my job, my time in Portland, my life. (None of those is forthcoming, I truly hope.) But the rub is that I never plan for that time, or even imagine what it might be like. I just envision myself in that moment. And so I am cheated out of the moments in front of and around me. I spin and I twist.

Right now I am sitting at home by myself, as my husband is at rehearsal, thinking of the things I could be doing and should be doing right now -- in this moment -- to simplify and de-clutter my life. Instead, I can think only of the end of the evening, to the near future, when he comes home.

And so I wait.