Where do you see yourself in 10 years? It’s a standard job interview question probably meant to test your goals or whether you're career-oriented. As this is my first post to the Silver Bloggers community, I want to ask you the same question - Where do you see yourself in ten years? Still on Hive, presumably… I see myself doing that, too, and being angry at a lot of things. Why wouldn’t I? I’ll still be a part of the community that is our world so I have the right to say it if I don’t like the way things are going.
We know we won’t be around 100 years from now, but once we start to behave accordingly we’re as good as dead.
The idea for this post came to me while listening to a 1959 interview with Carl Jung, where he was asked what advice he had for an older person facing their own mortality.
“To live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries and then he lives properly. But when he is afraid, when he doesn’t look forward, he looks back, he petrifies, he gets stiff and he dies before his time. But when he is living on looking forward to the great adventure that is ahead, then he lives.”
Live like you still have centuries ahead of you!
Here, in the eastern part of the world, very few people look forward to anything. People fade into retirement, go from one doctor to another and the only thing they look forward to is getting their pension money each month. You sometimes get the feeling they’re just waiting for the undertaker to come get them.
Maybe things will change once my generation approaches retirement age, although I doubt it.
The problem lies with how you live your life before reaching your euphemistically-called golden age. Unfortunately, many people have jobs they hate, but they need the money. Making money becomes a goal in itself and there’s little time for anything else. Once they don’t need to work anymore there’s nothing left to do. If there was never a time for adventure in your life, you may not be able to find a sense of adventure later in life. It’s not impossible, but it rarely happens.
If we want to escape this fate we need to start making plans and find new interests while we still feel the drive to do so.
Lately, I’ve been studying Portuguese. It started as a useful thing as we were preparing for a trip to Portugal. Once there, I got some books and I decided I want to be able to read them someday. It doesn’t matter that I've already read them in English. It’s something I want to do. Maybe someday I’ll go back to Lisbon and find it useful to know the language. Who knows? In the next 100 years or so I might be doing that. My future is not written and I can make it any damn way I want it to be.
Oddly enough, I realized that’s just how I was thinking when I was 10 and trying to learn Spanish from a book we had. There was no point in learning Spanish, no practical use of any kind, but it seemed interesting. Does this mean I’m childish? Maybe, but it also means that I still have a sense of wonder about what the future may bring.
I don’t think that’s enough and I’ll be looking for other things to do, but at least I think I’m in a good place, mentally speaking. (Getting to read and understand Jung would be great, but I don't know if I'm smart enough!)
As I am a realist by definition I know that 10 years from now I’ll be a grandmother, and I look forward to that. But I certainly won’t be your typical grandmother. God have mercy on the poor child who’ll be expecting granny to bake a nice cake! I’ll do my bit of reading stories, but I’ll also tell the kid about the books I read. A few months ago I enjoyed telling my son about a series I was reading, spoiling it for him, but I needed someone to know what my favorite character was going through. Why not do the same with a grandchild? Should I be any different because I’m older? I don’t think so! I don’t want to be the funny-smelling granny who has nothing else to do with her life than bake a cake. There’s the danger they’ll see me as crazy granny, but I can live with that!