The Long Trek Home

Life has a way of being completed in incremental journeys by age, career, family, and location. I’ve been blessed through my life to recognize these important steps and I can plot my past with laser focus.

But the future is often fuzzy. Uncertain. What I know, think and plan for today, could easily be different tomorrow. Next Year. Next Decade.

My sister passed with an open and unfinished book in her possession. It was a planning book for her last days. I’m sure she felt it was years in the process, but reality has taught us a brutal lesson. Time waits for no one. When it’s time, it’s over. Your long trek home has come to an end.

Planning

I cannot but help think that each of us needs a reality check. What we think we are aiming for is not necessarily how it will end out. When we are young we think we have an unlimited schedule in front of us. As we age, the reality of yesterday’s choices are painfully present. A health scare, or financial bad choice, anything can shake our comfort zone and suddenly everything is different.

Since I’ve lived in the mountains of Alaska and Washington for over 30 years, we are always hearing the story about planning for the trip we are about to undertake.

Plan for the unexpected!

Some think they are merely taking a nature stroll, and with nothing more than what they have in their pockets, the cavalry gets called out hours and days after they go missing. Others plan for any occurrence, but life has a tricky way of upending all our plans. A fall. A broken bone. A heart attack. Even a wild animal!

I suspect many career choices realize the blessings of long range planning, but there are relationship challenges, family battles, and health concerns. Any of these can challenge our perspective.

No amount of planning assures success on any trek home.
We learn to row with the flow,
beach our vessel when the storms arrive,
change our expectations
and wish we had made better choices of life earlier on.

Your Choices do Not Guarantee Today’s Success

We heard the warnings about investing in the financial markets. Think Day Trading. You cannot replicate another persons success. Every second the rolling tide lifts and falls, often unexpectedly going to the extremes.

Have you ever read the warnings of the miracle cures the pharmaceutical companies offer? Go ahead. Grab that bottle and study the warnings!

Pick up the warning tags on mattresses, or dry cleaning plastic wraps, or that hot coffee you buy in the drive through. Get on that airplane… Remember, the manufacturers won the right to supply the rivets had the cheapest bid!

Warnings show up in the oddest place. Why? Because someone has had problems in the past, or the creators can see potential problems for some in the future.

Best Choices

Learning to control how we respond to crisis often make for better results. Dealing from the middle of multiple stages of life, I can say I think I’ve made some good choices, but reality says there’s a future to think through, equally there’s a past to reconcile. Planning with an expected end in mind should include flexibility, contingency thinking, and keeping the surprise off your face when that Jack in the Box pops his head out of hiding.

My bride and I have had some honest dialogue about the ending we want in life, and have we planned well enough to reach the end successfully. Will there be surprises? Sure. Have we safety nets in place? I sure hope so… It’s a long trek ahead to get to where we think we are headed.