I’m sitting here in the classroom as my students work through a prompt. They have ten minutes left to figure it out, so I decided to keep time with the blog here. I find myself looking back in time to when I was first teaching this subject matter at another school–Estrella Mountain Community College. I was still in my (very late) twenties and thinking that life was endless. Here I am in my late forties and wondering where all of that time and energy and youth went. Was it wasted? What were the experiences I absorbed, appreciated, endured? Since then I have been divorced, moved one of three kids into college, gained three more kids, 50 more lbs, and developed a heart condition that if left unchecked is going to murder me in under a decade.
Things have changed quite a bit.
I don’t have a vision for what life will be like in 20 more years. This is the first moment I’ve thought about this as a real midpoint in that post collegiate journey or a stage in my life that will shift dramatically in short order. I don’t know that I can ever retire and live the lifestyle my partner and I want and have grown accustomed to. So it becomes a matter of deciding what life should — even could — look like.
I don’t know.
I am trying to figure it out everyday between working, playing games, living a couples life, raising kids, and living out my fantasy life of being a writer. Maybe the answer is somewhere in what I just wrote.