Mysteries

During our lifetime, we face many perplexing and difficult situations, many difficult questions. Yet somehow we manage to survive. Some people have a plan for their life and follow it, never straying from their career path or family plan.

For an increasing number of us, we have to alter our plans to adapt to the changes in the economy, our health, our relationships and all the other variables.

Looking back over our lives we find that we had anything but a straight line of trajectory from there to here. With all these changes and how we have grown, sometimes it is simply a mystery how we took on careers that we never planned on, successfully moved to parts of the country we never planned on living in, got divorced, remarried, divorced, changed religions, changed eating and drinking habits, and yet somehow, we worked our way through mysteries and changes to arrive here now. What comes to mind is the lyrics of that old Bob Dylan song My Back Pages, when he says "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Remember how definite your answer was when you were in school and the teacher asked you what you were going to be when you grew up? It is the reverse now when people ask what we are going to do. For many of us the answer is that we will never retire, that we will simply keep doing something until we drop. Our grandparents might have spent their final years in the rocking chair watching TV, but that is not the way we are going to go out. Well, at least not some of us.

Mysteries? Who could have forseen our 80-something parents taking up email? Who could have forseen ever growing parts of the population making a living sitting around diddling with things on their computers? Who could have forseen so many people who need to make an effort to get out and get some exercise after work because we don't do anything physical at work? An earlier generation would have thought the idea ludicrous to come home from a day's work and lift weights or jog or whatever because they sweated and developed muscles doing all kinds of work.

Who would have thought that one day we would not print photos on paper, but simply store them on our computers? And if we do not occasionally back them up or print out any hard copies, one day if our computer crashes, all those photos could disappear as if they had never existed in the first place. Ahhhh, more mysteries.