Envisioning a Future

The lights went on for me while I was reading a book review that described its main character as unable to envision a future. Envision a future! Is that what people do?

 I have barely been able to envision a present, to figure out what I want to do now, and act on it. That's what I've been working on. Now, almost finished with my seventh decade, I feel ready to envision a future, but I don't feel capable of creating one.

It's true I have done a little visioning. Over the years I have become more capable of making plans and following them through. I suppose that's what has led to me finally being ready to envision a future. I think it started when I was a young mother. First I realized that the notion that we, the nuclear generation, despite the popular notion, were actually living past age thirty. I began to get inklings there would be life after laundry, and I tried to plan for it. I wanted to learn to work, make a paycheck, even have a career.

Previously all my inquiries into what I could be doing had been met with answers that indicated they were preparation for something else: high school for college, college for grad school, but the bridge to a life was never visible. I knew very few professionals. They were men. What they did was invisible. The fact that everything in the human world was created intentionally by humans was not clear to me.

So, the professions I knew of from direct contact were limited: pediatricians, psychiatrists, nurses, schoolteachers. Lawyers and architects were abstractions. I didn't know there was such a thing as business. Of course beggarman, thief, Indian chief as well as receptionist, secretary, bus driver, airline stewardess were off limits. Don't learn to type; you will end up a secretary. No, you don't want to be a nurse, you want to be a doctor.

How could I know whether I wanted to be a doctor? Having been told so, how was I to evaluate for myself? I had no experience of a contrasting possibility.

Being a housewife and mother was the state that being a doctor was in contrast to. Yet, realistically, whatever else I might strive for or achieve I would still be keeping house. And I never doubted that I would have children. Even though other roles were presented as alternatives, they were really only alternative in status. I would have a profession and be a real person, not an "only". No alternative ways of accomplishing that necessary work were conceivable. The knowledge that I would be doing it was deeply rooted.

But since being a mother is not a profession, and was not to be thought about as an adult role, I could not plan for it. It was something to be taken on after the plans had been implemented, the establishment of a profession accomplished.

And when I got older and began seeing a larger world, there still was no bridge to a future. Any envisioning of a future I have done has been as a flailing version of get me out of here! It is a panicked state with great need for immediate action and no breadth of vision, and no follow through.

The first step was acknowledging myself as an adult, ceasing to see adult humans as a separate species.