I’ve always been a planner.
With Mike, planning was easy. Because we knew so early on that we wanted to get married and have babies and all that good stuff, we were pretty strict about The Plan.
No, we weren’t going to go on holiday because Buy A House was in the plan, and that needed all our money. No, we wouldn’t stay in London because Have A Baby didn’t really fit in to that, and we knew we wanted to do that asap. It was all about The Plan. We knew what we wanted our life to look like, and dammit, we were going to get there.
Well.
That worked out well, huh?
I mean, it did, because I loved my life with Mike and I wouldn’t change it. I’m so glad we ended up in Northern Ireland, so glad he got those last years with his family and by his sea and so, so, inexpressibly, unfathomably, breathtakingly grateful that we had Lyla.
Beyond grateful.
But I realise now that all those years we were pouring absolutely everything into something that was, unbeknownst to us, never going to happen. And some of that energy (and money!) could have been used elsewhere, to make our daily lives more joyful, richer, more full of experience. Made the last years of Mike’s life about living, not striving.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to throw all thoughts of the future out of the window and stop planning altogether. Not only is that not sensible, it’s also so completely antithetical to my personality that it wouldn’t be possible! But what Mike’s death has taught me is that it doesn’t make sense to always be working towards a potential future at the detriment of the actual present that exists right in front of you.
Because the future isn’t going to look like you expect it to. It just isn’t. It might be worse, it might be better – but it will be different to the picture you have in your mind. You’ll be different, for a start. Your circumstances will be different, in ways you probably can’t even imagine. And all those carefully-laid plans – well, some of them will come to fruition, but others won’t, and even the ones that do might not make you happy in the way you imagine.
All we have is today.
I’m not saying I’m going to jump out of a plane every day or give it all up and go travelling, or anything. I don’t think every day has to be a stand out adventure. But I’ve realised that it’s important to make the most of every day – to find the small joys and suck the marrow out of them.
Because that’s all we’ve got, really. We have to do the long-term things – the working, the saving, the planning for the future – just in case.
But first and foremost, we have to be in today.
Just in case.