I Still Have Plans

Lately, I’ve caught myself doing a kind of math I never used to do. When I think about something that might take five or ten years, I find myself thinking not only about what I could build or where it might lead, but about how old I would be when I got there. That second calculation never used to get much attention. I was usually too interested in the idea itself, and in all the possibilities that might follow it. Now there is another consideration in the room, and although I would prefer to keep talking about the possibilities, it seems to have pulled up a chair.

The loss of a part of our family has brought some of this closer. There is the sadness of losing someone, and all the feelings that belong specifically to that person and their place in your life. But somewhere in that experience, I also started looking at my own life a little differently. Time became less abstract. I found myself thinking in calendars and chapters, wondering what the next stretch of life might look like and how much room there would be in it. These were not entirely new thoughts, but they had a different weight. Something I had always understood intellectually had become harder to keep at a comfortable distance.

For someone like me, that has been a strange adjustment. I am an incredibly optimistic person, often to a fault. Most people who know me would agree, although some would probably phrase it less generously. Give me a problem and I will start looking for a solution. Give me a reason something cannot work and I will wonder whether we have asked the right question yet. I enjoy researching, connecting ideas, and finding another way around an obstacle. I also tend to share all the possibilities I have discovered, sometimes well beyond the point at which the people around me would have preferred that I stop.

A lot of the pleasure I get from life comes from considering what I might do next. I don’t even have to do it. I can get excited about a business I never buy, a place I never move to, or an idea that never becomes anything beyond an interesting conversation. Exploring a possibility has value to me all by itself. I like knowing that I could change direction. There has always been something reassuring about looking ahead and seeing more than one way my life might unfold.

What I haven’t quite known how to explain lately is the feeling that some of those possibilities are becoming less available. Sometimes there is a practical reason. Sometimes it is simply the awareness that doing one thing would take years I would then not have for something else. And sometimes, especially lately, I suspect grief is making everything look a little more confined than it actually is. I don’t always know which of those I am feeling. I just know that, for someone who gets so much energy from having choices, the perception of fewer choices can bring an unfamiliar wave of sadness.

I had imagined this stage of life somewhat differently. I always wanted to be successful enough to retire early, while knowing perfectly well that I would probably never want to retire. I have too many interests, too many passions, and too many things I still want to try. My version of the golden years was never going to involve being finished. I pictured a little more freedom to follow my curiosity, to spend time with my wife, to explore something simply because it interested me. I expected to keep doing things. I just imagined there would be a clearer sense that I was choosing them.

Of course, I had children a little later in life, and they are still launching. Their lives have not unfolded on some neat schedule, and neither has mine. There are still needs, responsibilities, uncertainties, and circumstances I could not have included in the picture I carried around years ago. I love my family and want to help my children find their footing. I also find myself wanting more room for whatever this next chapter is going to be. Holding those two feelings together has been uncomfortable, partly because I wish wanting one did not sometimes feel like taking something away from the other.

Even writing that makes me aware of how fortunate I am. I have a family I love, things I am excited about, and choices many people would be grateful to have. I don’t want to lose sight of any of that. But I am trying to be honest about the difference between wanting to do something and feeling that I have to do it. The activity might look exactly the same from the outside, while the experience of it feels very different. Having the freedom to choose has always mattered to me, perhaps more than I understood when I assumed there would always be another opportunity to choose later.

The confusing part is that I remain enormously optimistic about the future. I look at AI, for example, and my mind goes immediately to what it might make possible. I imagine what properly harnessed intelligence could contribute to healthcare, to reducing the cost of care, to environmental problems, and to understanding the complicated causes of things like homelessness. I think about problems we have learned to live with because they seem too difficult, too expensive, or too politically tangled to solve. I don’t imagine technology makes all of that easy, but I cannot help wondering what becomes possible when we have better tools and more capacity to understand what we are dealing with. That still genuinely excites me.

So I can be thinking about a future full of extraordinary possibilities and, almost in the same moment, feel my own runway getting shorter. Those feelings seemed contradictory at first. How could I be so hopeful and feel so weighed down? But I am beginning to think they are about different things. I still believe there is a great deal ahead worth being excited about. What is changing is my assumption about how much of it I will personally get to participate in, and how many different lives I can fit inside the one I have.

Maybe what I am mourning is the ease with which I used to say “someday.” For most of my life, it was a perfectly reasonable place to put a dream. I would get to that when the business was settled, when the children were older, when things calmed down, or when the timing made more sense. Putting something off did not feel much like giving it up. There was still plenty of time to circle back. Now I am starting to recognize that some of those dreams may remain dreams, including a few I never really considered optional. I just assumed their turn would come.

That is hard to admit, especially because my instinct is to argue with it. I immediately want to find examples of people who started later, did more, or surprised everyone. I want to point out that there is still time, which there very well may be. But I can hear myself reaching for a solution before I have allowed myself to acknowledge what hurts. I don’t think I need to surrender my ambitions to recognize that I am sad about the possibility of not getting to all of them. And I don’t think every difficult feeling needs to be answered with a plan before I am allowed to talk about it.

I also don’t want this awareness to turn the rest of my life into a race. I know myself well enough to see that possibility. I could take the realization that time is limited and respond by trying to fit twice as much into it, turning even the things I enjoy into obligations. That would be a fairly predictable response from me, but I am not convinced it would make me happier. I would hate to become so concerned about running out of time that I stopped enjoying the time I was actually having.

There may be some useful honesty available here, once I get past my initial resistance. Some dreams still matter deeply to me. Others may belong more to the person I was when I first imagined them. I have carried them forward for so long that I haven’t necessarily asked whether I still want them, or whether I just dislike the idea of taking them off the list. I am curious about that distinction. There might be relief in letting a few things go willingly, rather than feeling that every unpursued possibility represents something time has taken from me.

And there are conversations I probably need to have about the dreams that do still matter. My family cannot be expected to know which ones I have quietly kept in the “someday” category, or why some of them are beginning to feel more urgent. They have their own hopes and needs, and a shared life means taking those seriously too. I would like to believe there is room to be more honest about what I want without making it a judgment about what anyone else wants. Perhaps we can make a little more room for each other’s next chapters without needing everything to be settled first.

I don’t know whether this mood will pass in a few weeks and my usual optimism will return at full volume. That is certainly possible, and some people around me may reasonably enjoy the quieter interval. It is also possible that I am adjusting to an awareness that will stay with me. I don’t have enough distance from it yet to know. Right now, I can feel both the sadness and the curiosity, sometimes on the same day, and I am trying not to insist that one of them must be the truth and the other a temporary mistake.

What gives me hope is that I am still interested. I still hear an idea and want to learn more. I still imagine places I would like to spend time, things I would like to build, and experiences I would like to have with the people I love. None of that has disappeared. Perhaps I don’t need to recover the exact feeling I had when time seemed unlimited. Perhaps I can find a way to enjoy what is ahead without needing the reassurance that everything I have ever wanted will eventually fit.

I wish I could finish this by saying I have made peace with all of it, but I haven’t. Some days I feel the loss more than the possibility. On other days, something catches my attention and I am off exploring again, reminded that there is still a great deal here that makes me want to be involved. For now, I am trying to give both kinds of days some room, and to stop treating my life as something that will open up completely once every responsibility has been resolved. I still have plans, and I am still excited to see what happens next. I would just like to bring a few of the things I have been saving for someday into the life I am living now.