The Unknown Future

crossroads2, originally uploaded by RobPat.

Maybe for a decade, or longer, all the future seemed visible. We were still raising our children and we were still building our career. We had a plan and an objective.

Then the certainty diminished. Our children are now grown up. Our career is settled and is in the final chapter. Those goals, so clear twenty years before have been met. Looking up the road, we see the next bend but no further. Our youth has gone and with it our waistline, our skin tone and even our hair. The only certainties ahead now seem to be our physical decline and our death. We look back with regret at moments missed. We have time to feel the pain from our childhood that we had buried in our work and in the effort of raising our own children. We look across the table at our partner and wonder if we know them anymore. We have been so busy that we have lost touch. What is our contract going to be now? The material goals of our partnership are done.

Never again will we presume to know what is around the corner.

But is this true? Maybe there is a goal that we can find together that will take us to the grave and beyond? Maybe there is a goal that transcends our bodies and the world of things and stuff?

As our bodies must decline, so our spirits can grow. Can we nourish our spirit so that when the last day comes, we step gently into the universe and join the stars from where we came "trailing clouds of glory".