Bury me not on the lone prairie. At least not yet.

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

Tao te Ching
—————

School, Marriage, Children, Death.

In that order. That’s the summation of a life as I always envisioned it.

The thing is, school-marriage-children come in quick succession, boom boom boom. Somehow my life plan didn’t take into account that there might be some time before that last stage. Shockingly, at least to me, it’s not an instantaneous cause-and-effect (as much as it may feel that way when you’re raising a teenage daughter).

So as my child grows up, I’m actually surprised by the fact that I’m not quite as ready to have my old bones buried in the chapel graveyard as I once believed.

In fact, I’d like to argue that my bones are still rather supple. Despite the creaking and popping and feeble desire to grunt as I stand up, there is a distinct absence of the odor of lilac water and mothballs that should be accompanying my imminent departure.

I’m afraid this means I’m going to have to live for a while longer.

OK, ok. So I’m only 44 years old. There are a large number of individuals on the other end of the baby boom who might laugh at the mortality pressing down on my middle-aged brow. But really. I didn’t expect this.

The worst part, though, is that if I’m going to live, it means that stretching out before me there is still a FUTURE. I actually have to plan a life. And then live it. This kind of pisses me off. Nobody warned me.

The future is quite an ominous thing, no matter where we sit on our undefined and precarious time-line.

And if I’m going to have one, start all over again, I’m not sure quite how to approach it.

When I was young the future was a wide vista of endless possibilities. All the things I could do, all the things that might happen to me. It was all very exciting, and I was entitled to all of that excitement. I wasn’t much of a worrier back then, and I assumed it would all be grand adventures that would someday be assembled into a fascinating book that would be read and treasured by generations to come.

The one thing the future never was, though, was finite. “The end” didn’t figure much into my imaginative autobiographical musings. School-marriage-children-death was what happened to OTHER people. I was going to be different, because my path was most assuredly eternal. And yet there it sits now. Once I hit marriage and children, I realized I had no choice. I had accidentally slipped into mortalty. Maybe “the end”  lives far into the future at the end of long stay at some stinky old-home facility (where I’ll be lucky to have the drool wiped regularly from my chin). Maybe it is hiding immediately around the corner behind the wheel of a careening truck in the hands of a drunk driver. It changes nothing: “the end” is as inevitable as… well… those proverbial taxes and their hooded partner.

This new planning is so different from those endless dreams of childhood. Knowing that there is some mysterious drop-off point or a giant wall obstructing my hitherto presumed immortality lends a certain frantic urgency to the future, and a sense of wasteful idleness to the present.

Hurry, hurry! urges the universe. There is a deadline, in the most literal sense. Without infinite possibilities, suddenly choices matter. I’ve never lived too long in one place and I always imagined I’d be able to eventually live everywhere. I may have been overly optimistic, there. There are only so many places I might fit into this tighter schedule. All the women I thought I could be in my life are fading. There are only so many faces left to wear. Panic sets in.

The possibilities still FEEL endless, because that’s what possibilities always were. This contradictory reality has me frozen, unable to choose. I never feared choosing wrongly before, because there were always takesy-backsies and do-overs. Now every step I take seems to etch itself in stone, permanent and irreversible. They take me on a specific path. My power of selection is being snatched from my decreasingly flexible fingers.

This depresses the hell out of me. Whither my internal Auntie Mame, living an endless madcap adventure? Life may be a banquet, but apparently I’m on a strict diet.

Its all very ludicrous, of course. Anyone in their 60s can tell me that the time I have left “post motherhood” will seem like lifetimes upon lifetimes compared to the time I’ve spent fulfilling the obligatory roles of youth, and I’m sure anyone in their 80s will scoff at the professed wisdom of those 60-year-old zygotes.

Maybe I should just forget all this self-indulgent existential nonsense and run away and join a circus. When I grow up I want to be a lion tamer. Or maybe a ballerina. Or a detective, like Nancy Drew…