I’ve been struck by one thing more than any other lately: You never know. You just never know.
We live in a world where governments in the Middle East are toppling or facing revolt on a daily basis. After 30 plus years under a dictator, the Egyptian people stage a few demonstrations, the government shuts down access to the Internet to stop the tweeting, but alas, Mubarek steps down.
In Libya, Gadaffi – or Qadaffy or however one is supposed to spell his name these days – is clinging to his seat of power by sending his sons and their armies into battle against his own people. But the people are fighting back and, in many cases, winning. They want a chance to govern themselves. To try their hand at democracy. In response, our own Nobel Peace Prize-winning President sends missiles hurtling through the sky at Libyan targets.
I can’t say I saw that coming. I was pretty sure things were always going to be as they have been in the Middle East – an area torn by strife, suspicion and hatred without hope of harmony. An area held together – however illogical it may sound – by distrust and dictators.
But hey, you never know.
My wife told me a story the other day about a woman she used to work with. The woman woke up one morning and was blind. The light streaming into her bedroom was little more than a dull blur. Where she would have seen her husband’s face, she now saw only a shadow. Doctors found lesions all over her brain. But things like that don’t happen without some sort of warning, right?
Wrong.
A beautiful Friday afternoon in Japan turns indescribably tragic when an earthquake of record proportions spawns a Tsunami that devastates the land and kills thousands. The nuclear power plants hang precariously in the balance, and we all hold our breath a world away.
The unknown and unexpected can overpower us without any regard for what we dream, for what we hope, for what we deserve.
Life is brutal.
But what about the guy who was in his car about to leave a party at a friend’s house when he decided he’d better run back in to use the restroom before driving home and – while standing in line – quite unexpectedly
meets the woman of his dreams and ends up marrying her.
That was me.
And what about the couple who went to the doctor for help when they couldn’t conceive and were told they never would? The same couple that now has an 11-year-old honors student who has a personality of a rock star and the heart of an angel.
That was Patti and me. And of course, Jackson.
So, the unknown and the unexpected are not always destructive. At times, they can be the most wonderful, creative forces in our personal universe.
Life is beautiful.
Whether beautiful or brutal, this life is the one we get. Almost every school night of my childhood, my mom used to say, “Better get to bed. Morning comes very early.” I don’t know why that phrase has always stuck with me. I say it to Jackson all the time. Maybe it’s the implication behind the words. The idea that you have to be ready for tomorrow. Not only is going to sneak up on you, but you never know what it is going to bring. You’re going to want to be awake for every minute of it. To me, it somehow captured the very essence of life. To my mom, it was probably just a way to scuttle us off to our rooms. There were six of us kids, and the sooner we got to bed, the sooner she would get some well-deserved peace and quiet.
Nevertheless, I’ve adopted the phrase as my own. I don’t know what Jackson thinks when I use it to bid him a goodnight, but I know it still makes me think about the mysteries of tomorrow.
Did my grandparents or great-grandparents ever dream that we would all be walking around with telephones in our pockets? Telephones, by the way, that have more computing power than existed in the known universe at the time of their own birth? Probably not.
I recently attended a conference for work that was focused on emerging technologies, and they talked about things like visual display contact lenses – your computer/mobile device screen layered directly onto your
eyeball. Can our brains handle all the potential visual input? Probably. But maybe not.
I couldn’t help but think of those 1980s classics – Scanners and Max Headroom – where the data inundated and overwhelmed citizens met a very explosive fate. Is that our destiny? I doubt it. But I do know you can now find those classics instantly on Netflix streaming collection. Almost everything is excessively available – data of all sorts, including cheesy 80s movies and TV shows.
Our future is as unpredictable as the future of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The future we are living today. What will tomorrow bring?
I don’t know. No one does.
But I do know that we can all be sure that morning is going to come very early.
