The Life You Thought You Would Have

Ram Dass once asked the question ,

“If everything in your life had come out the way you expected it to, your life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as it’s turned out to be, would it?”

There is humor in the question.

Tenderness too.

And for me, a slow sting.

Because for me the understanding did not arrive in one moment. There was no single day when I saw it.

It was a culmination. A birthday. A form asking what I do.

An old picture of a face that felt so much younger.

And then one ordinary evening, doing nothing special, you feel it:

This is not the life I planned.

Not a worse life. Maybe not even a sadder one!

Just profoundly, without a doubt, different: Not the one I expected.

You have this “imaged life” too.

In that life, the relationship lasted. The work became meaningful.

By now, you had arrived at the place you once pictured.

But the the birthdays open the door.

So do the questions: “Is this where you thought you would be?”

This simply is not the life you expected.

And no one has a funeral for an imagined life. So what do you do?

Well, you can call the yourself ungrateful and tell yourself to stop.

But if you do that, the un-lived life does not disappear.

It becomes a silent standard, one we can never meet.

And underneath are the questions that keep it alive:

If I stop longing for the life I expected, am I giving up?

But if I accept this life, am I saying my dreams don’t matter?