Future Ponderance

I recall my having saved something: A special sized box … a uniquely colored rubber band … an old, old hat … or a million sundry other things, thinking that sometime in the future I might find a use or application for whatever it was. Looking back, it seems like I was traversing a universally large area, without dimensions or size, and occasionally thinking I might need some item I saw or held, sometime in the future, so … I’d save it. I’ve been doing that for nearly eighty years now. And, it suddenly dawned on me this afternoon: I don’t have a long-term future any more. The limitless sized “room” I have been traversing, has been narrowing, shrinking, lessening in size and scope while I have been paying attention to “things”. The arena of Life I’ve been living in has all the while been diminishing, and astonishingly, I’ve just now come to that realization: Sometime in the not-too-distant future, all those “things” I’ve been “saving for some future use”, won’t ever be re-initiated inside whatever domain I had, at one time, envisioned they would be. That realization made me remember, when my mother passed away and I and my family members wandered through the collection of her belongings, began to fathom just how many “things” she had collected for “future use”. They were contained there, where she had left them in drawers, closets, wrapped in plastic grocery bags or newspapers. They never realized the “future” she had foreseen for them. They never would. The things that were her important “usefuls”, became just discarded items once they were voided of her imagination of her future needs. Our dreams and aspirations are of the same ilk, just as our well-meaning “intentions”. Once we are gone, those intentions all evaporate into an invisible void. Maybe one of the saddest, empty utterances of mankind is: “I was going to …”. So, beginning tomorrow, I think I’ll commence ridding myself of “future” stuff, lying here and there for no real reason. Oh, there’s no doubt, as I touch and pick up each of those former “future” pieces, I’ll stop to ponder what my original thought and vision had been for it to be placed, and still lying, in that dusty box. It’s gonna be a long, memory-messaging day, I bet.