I used to think about my future in terms of the years ahead, although, as a child, I only thought about the minutes and hours ahead, perhaps just wondering what mum was making for tea tonight. Minutes and hours became days, as I started school, then the days became week-days with a weekend to look forward to, then months between the Christmas and summer holidays. As I moved through primary school, each year leading toward the ‘big school’ I wondered whether I would go to the High School or Junior Secondary. Then, having progressed to High School, a sense of actually having a future that I should think about became something real.
Over the years of education, leading to the specialisations and exams that would define future qualifications and careers, I began to consider whether to continue into further education or find a job, wondering which option would offer me the better or more prosperous future. Fate of course made decisions for me and many years later, having married and had children, their future seemed to be more important, while I looked forward to a restful retirement with time for exciting holidays to faraway places.
The current pandemic however has cancelled, for now, any fond hopes I had for holidays abroad, or even just days out to the seaside, browsing through little souvenir shops, eating lunch in a café with a glass of chilled white wine. It has also brought anxious thoughts of whether, at my ‘vulnerable’ age, I will have any future at all in this life.
But the future will soon be the present and the present will soon be the past so I might as well continue to live in hope, and even expectation, that life will go on and our world will eventually go forward into more agreeable times and, in the meantime, will have learned something worthwhile about our environment for the future.