Flash Forward

I started taking piano lessons when I was 8 years old. I didn’t really enjoy it that much, and I wanted to quit a few years later. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, though. So many older people in my church or family always told me that they regretted quitting piano lessons when they were young. Or they wished they had had the opportunity to take lessons when they were young. I trusted their more experienced perspectives, and I didn’t want to kick myself when I was older for quitting when I had been given this wonderful opportunity to take lessons from a fantastic teacher.

I think about the future a lot. Some may say that’s the “N” in INTJ. I have trouble thinking in terms of the present, which is sometimes really annoying, but sometimes it does help to think about what my future self would tell my present self to do based on the future. I guess I don’t really know what my future self would tell me, but I think that I use a lot of what older people tell me to develop what I think future-me would say. I don’t know if, had I not continued to play piano, that my future self would actually have regretted quitting. Who I am now and who I am in 10 or 30 or 50 years is in a way based on what I did in that present moment when I was 11 years old and decided to stick it out.

When Nathan was four days old, Gus and I celebrated our first anniversary. As I rocked my baby in the recliner that night, I had what I guess I would call a flash forward. I imagined my sweet little baby all grown up into a handsome young man standing at the front of a church waiting for his bride. And then I completely lost it.

I’m so scared of wishing life away, of “living” in the future and never enjoying the present because that's exactly what I've always done. And I hear the voices of all the women at the grocery store, “They grow up so fast.” And I imagine myself, on the second pew of the church, looking at my grown-up son on his wedding day, and I’m terrified that I will say to myself with regret, “I want to go back.”

Nathan was nine months last Friday. On Saturday, we went to a brunch for the women of the church. I put him down when we got there, and he hardly looked back at me for the next hour and a half. Even then, I think I just brought him over next to me to make sure he was out of the way. Already, it is bittersweet to see him growing up into his own little person. My future self is screaming at present-me, “They grow up so fast!”; I want make sure to cherish every single one of these days with open hands and a full and thankful heart.