I have been in a “wise guy” mood lately, thus the title above.  I am coming up on 70 years of age and when you get that old some of us reflect on how we got here, and why.  My wife is not one of those but I am. She seems so content to just do the same thing day-after-day, year-after-year with no desire for any change. She is just not a dreamer or ponderer as I am. Like so many other things we are opposites in that regard. They (whoever “they” are) say opposites attract and I can certainly testify to that in my marriage. But that is not meant to be the main point of this post.

I am a dreamer, planner, ponderer, or whatever you want to call it. I am always thinking of the future and how I might make it better than the present, or maybe just hoping that it will be better.  Pondering the future has just been who I am throughout my life. In my younger days I absolutely needed to get away from everyone for moments of meditation. When I was in college sharing a 10 x 15 dorm room with a roommate I would frequently go out in the middle of the night to my favorite place on campus, which was along the railroad tracks out by the airport, to just be by myself and think about the future. I had to have time alone I guess in the same way that I had to have the next cigarette in those days. I broke the nicotine addiction twenty plus years ago but, good or bad, didn’t do likewise with my dreamer instincts.

I realize that if genetics have anything to say about it I am facing my final decade on this earth. The dreaming space is being compressed more and more as each day passes. One mini-epiphany I seem to  be having lately is that I got to quit some of the dreaming and just start accepting each day as it comes.  Don’t get me wrong, dreaming has made my life more fulfilling and rewarding than it might have been.  It has driven me to take chances that I might not have otherwise taken. I definitely do not look back on my life and say “I wish I had dreamed less”. But I sometimes do regret not taking enough actions to more completely fulfill my dreams. I let too many of them just disappear in the mist of my life.

I kind of see the absence of dreaming, planning, and pondering as defeat.  It seems if I cannot look for more  in my world than I have now I am just spinning in place waiting to die.  One of the downfalls of dreaming about the future is that I probably haven’t spent quite enough time just appreciating the present.  This late in my life I have come to understand that in the overall picture of life it’s about the journey and not the destination.

I am “That Wise Guy”