A great philosopher, my granddad, once said that if you spend all your time thinking about the future you’ll miss out on the present and have no past.  Another great philosopher, my grand-mother, slapped on the back of the head and told him to finish working on the next month’s budget.  In my book, granddad was right because at the time I was only 7 years old and I wanted to go out to the park.  I was waiting on him to finish the budget and I thought, in my youthful wisdom, that such things could wait for later.

Kids don’t think about the future so much as they just can’t wait for things to arrive.  I remember waiting anxiously for my first concert date.  We bought the tickets about 2 weeks in advance.  Those felt like the longest two weeks of my life.  It’s like that throughout your childhood.  You cannot wait for the future to get here and yet when it finally comes you feel like you are completely unprepared for it.

The day I graduated high school my friends and I felt like we had waited a lifetime for our freedom.  Well, we had.  But we finally got it.  And by summer’s end half my friends had either joined the military or gone to college.  I was looking for my first job.

We’re sailing across the same sea, and there are many of us.  In the greater scheme of things we are small, forgettable pieces of flotsam bobbing in the waves.  I learned early on to make a name for myself in whatever little pond I was in because that was the only way anyone would notice me.  My first job was as a dishwasher in a low-budget restaurant.  I decided I wanted to be a kitchen prep cook and I worked hard to get that position.  Finally, when the day came, and I won my promotion, I got only a slight pay raise.

Such are the rewards of hard work.  But at least I wasn’t standing in the middle of hot water and dirty dishes any more.

Once in a while I long for those carefree days of high school when my friends and I would ditch our homework and go down to the mall.  I don’t want to hang out at the mall any more but I’d love to be able to hang with my friends and do fun stuff.  We all have families and jobs and bills to pay.  Somewhere on that road life takes us down we each took a separate exit and found ourselves arriving at the same destination.

We didn’t know what the future held for us but now that we are here we have learned what our parents already knew and what our children are not thinking about: that life never completely prepares you for what comes next.

That is what keeps it so interesting for me, but I sure wish I had gotten paid more when I worked at that restaurant.