May 7th, 2014
I stopped myself from looking into my future two years ago after my wife, Mimie, died. I just focus on whatever is occurring in my current moment as I make up my day while it unfolds. It's as if the minutes and seconds of each day are barreling down the track of a runaway train.
My track is no longer laid out before me on a pre-planned destination; I'm over that. Instead, I lay my track before me as my life unfolds. I do this track at a feverish pace since life is always fluid and dynamic, but at least I can make on-the-spot decisions and change my future. It's the only way I can avoid the misfortune that life seems to hand people. I need not plan my future because I can't count on where life takes me. Since 2006, there have been significant derailments on what I thought my train was headed on a pre-planned track with all its future destinations in front of me.
Stop 1: A career
Stop 2: Find love
Stop 3: Have kids
Stop 4: Live a fruitful life!
Talk about a defunct railroad system. My future path isn't even worth combining Monopoly's Reading Railroad, Pennsylvania Railroad, B & O Railroad, and Short Line Railroad!
I don't need a map to show me where this track is supposed to be laid anymore because that future rail line has been destroyed by life before the age of 40. I need to figure out where I'm headed because I ignore all the rail signs along my travels. As my path extends out in front of me, I'm making up my next move as I keep moving along those steel rails. Sadly, I have chosen to live life uncertainly. Still, I would rather control my destiny as it is occurring in the moment rather than a further plan that seems to derail anytime I place any planning into it.
The hard part, I found, of trying to carefully lay my tracks within my minutes and hours is that I'm finding out that no matter how careful I am with that placement, it seems that I can't avoid trouble or even heartache, no matter where I selectively set my path. I'm finding out that I can't control my future even by living by the seat of my pants. Trouble is in our lives, and it comes out of nowhere.
My unfortunate events that continue to happen are causing me to realize that as hard as I try to forget about my future, the very tracks of my past that I'm doing my best to avoid are still there haunting me because I haven't learned that there is a future beyond this day.
Trouble and heartache are how we humans test our inner ability to overcome adversity and where we find our strength. At least, I like to think that's where my strength comes from because, damn it, lord knows I have had more than my fair share of loss and heartache. Most of us have. Even the rich and powerful. Do I just forget I have a future?
Why, when we're at our lowest in life, do our woes not only make us selfish but narcissistic to feel that we are the only ones who are going through any type of problems? So, we find that isolating ourselves from other people's burdens is better than seeking people who can help us. And we will contact people on our railroad tracks of life.
Sometimes, trains travel on a single track. Other cars are tied in with that big engine on their ride through life. And those cars have people inside them from all walks of life. Those people are riding those tracks through the same life I'm living, yet I do my best to avoid them. All those people indeed some of them have their own complications from a bad hand that life has dealt them. Some, if not most, problems can test anyone's will to survive heartache and make us human beings question, "Where is God? Why is he derailing me? Does God hate my metaphoric trains?
I love a train. Trains fascinate me. Large steal rising 15 feet in the air. Sleek lines form the body. Sheer power barreling down an open rail line. The train horn blasts, waking up people for miles around. A train engine is a mighty presence. That engine, it's pretense, the power, well, that is me.
Those train cars we fill are the life we decided to fill because someone or something gave us a promise.
The hard fact is that those cars of life we fill will keep moving with or without my engine. My heart and soul keep it filled with energy so it continues moving down my track. My heart has to be strong in my life. Being pessimistic about how I move through my life doesn't help me when I arrive at my next stop. And let's face it. My train is moving to the next stop.
No matter what happens today, there is still life tomorrow. I can arrive full-heartedly at my destination with an open mind and take hold of a new opportunity. Or waste all my time and energy kicking and screaming while I get there. Leaving myself with no motivation to accept that a new day and a new destination had come because I failed to prepare for it due to my stubbornness to live and play in the minutes of a day rather than a plan of a lifetime.
But that train will move again on to the next stop. I can either learn from my past or stand alone at the station while others carry on without me. I have to look onward as a new day presents itself and what the previous travels have led me to feel inside. And from this point forward, I can look on towards my new destination with optimism. I just have to train myself once again to look beyond these people laying that track in front of me and peer into my future already laid before me.
I decide where this train of life goes, and that track is laid here.
Stop 1: For my future.
I can't plan on a minute-by-second whim anymore. I must look into the sunset as the tracks shimmer in the blazing sun. My train has a wide-open space of unfettered life, my life, to pursue and live whatever my heart desires. This new confidence will be okay because I trust myself, as the train conductor, to proceed on this track of uncertainty. I realize that I can still reinforce myself with wood and steal just because I lay those future tracks already in front of me.
Stop 2:
The framework of life's work is in progress. It shall lead me to a better tomorrow. All Aboard the train of life! Don't hesitate.
Your life is waiting, too.
1,158 words
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