Maybe I'll Just Pitch a Hammock

Even though I am often thinking about the future and future plans, I still don't have much patience waiting for things to happen in the future. Take previously described new garden bed - I know it will get better and better each year, but I want an instantly beautiful garden with big wonderful hollyhocks, spreading Russian sage and phlox that has multiplied all over the place. I can envision it so why isn't it THERE already! Patience, patience.

I am improving in my sense of things happening in the future. Owning a home has helped. While I will gratify my urgent desires by making lists of projects, I can also see how over time the projects will unfold through the years, how I can space the projects out and still be quite happy in my home (perhaps happiest in the spring when I can get out, ride around the gorgeous old town neighborhood under the spreading trees and past blossoming plants, getting out of rooms I obsessed about during cold weather). Patience, patience.

Perhaps it's finally being in my thirties, but I am starting to see the unfolding of seeds I planted or didn't plant many years ago - the resulting community that I live in. I get a sense that, not to break a deeply emotional and complicated human experience down solely to economics, relationships - how we treat others - are investments. Not karma but the results of how I've been with others. More and more I value and consciously nurture my friendships because like so many things in life (my the list is long, when I consider it - education, cars, houses, kids, pets, gardens, retirement accounts, anything with a future) what I put in now will directly affect what they are like in the future. Relationships are long term projects, unfolding over and through the hills, down cliffs, up steep climbs, beside the ocean. How clearly I see the consequences of choices.

While feeling this investment immediately, and the importance of now, I also am intimidated by the consequences of my choices and the power I hold in what I do and do not do. How much effort I put into projects at work - what I choose to push forward - may make a profound change in the future. I found at St. John's that my education was what I put into it. If I didn't read, didn't participate in class, didn't engage, I lost. I can feel now that life also is what I choose to make of it. Change is now (if you have a chance to see the "Great Debators" do so - I cried when Samantha debated at the University of Texas. I get chills thinking about it).

Maybe I should have better understood investments and choices earlier - I think several people tried to get me to really understand. I suppose I fumbled along fairly well. Sometimes the power of my choices is deeply energizing and sometimes it is deeply overwhelming to the point that I want to pitch a hammock in my new garden and stay there to watch it come to life. Swing life away.