Our Future In Perspective
By: P.G. Barnett
Tags: Old Age, Life Lessons, Émotion, Perspective, Top Shelf Pg

Never let it be said (or accepted as a fact) an aging creative can’t stoically stumble through the rest of his or her life. Just by virtue of living as long as some of us have we’ve gained a lot of the traits that define stoicism.

Many of us have gained wisdom from the insanity we perpetrated when we were younger. We’ve learned discretion from the many times we spoke out of turn or slipped up and told someone an embarrassing secret either about ourselves or someone else.

We’ve gained piety and wisdom from years of self-reflection. We’ve become firmly entrenched in a passionate belief of equity and fairness after witnessing the degrading manner our fellow Humans have been treated. We want everyone to be treated with equanimity regardless of their sexual preferences, the color of their skin, or the deities they worship.

We’ve constantly witnessed so much sorrow in this world of ours and have experienced it in our own lives, we’re quick to laugh at ourselves and recognize the humorous things in the world around us.

After all of this, and in the later years of our rapidly shortening lifespan, we realize there’s no benefit in looking back and pondering all the regrets we’ve built.

There’s truly no time for regrets.

We understand what we need to do is focus on the future, albeit it a short one, and figure out what we’re going to do to make it a good one. We’ve learned to concentrate on what the future holds for us, the years we have yet to live, and put our future in a proper perspective.

All of us older generation (think baby boomers) know we need to be asking ourselves questions such as: will the life we’ve lived to this point be the only one people recall? Will our actions from right now to the end of our days be the future self we want people to remember and cherish?

At this late stage of the game, we often realize the choice of how we really want to be remembered is ours, has always been ours. We know we can revert back to our wild and zany feel-good days which seemed to gratify once upon a time. Or we can be that model Human we’ve spent years chiseling out of a block of stone.

Like I said, our choice.

But one thing we know we must never do and that’s spending the rest of our days regretting those moments from our past. Even those less than stellar events taught us something. Everything up to this very second in time has been a learning moment, a life lesson that molded and shaped the way we think and behave.

The last thing we need to do now is to examine those moments with a mindset of regret. We need to celebrate them, understand how we’ve turned those regrets into change for the better. Now is not the time to sit and cast our thoughts backward regretting almost every minute we lived.

With what little future we have left we should recognize the very real possibility we can change it, make it better than it’s ever been. All we have to do is put our future in a positive perspective. Take those learning moments from our past and apply them to what little future we have left.

Now is certainly not the time to sit idly waiting for the angel of death to swing the scythe. At our age, we have no time to ponder our regrets. We’ve still got many more opportunities to put our future in perspective, to adopt and embrace these positive perspectives as views of our own.

In short, we’ve still got some living to do.

Thank you so much for reading. You didn’t have to, but I’m certainly glad you did.

Let’s keep in touch: paul@pgbarnett.com

© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.