Waiting For The Future? Now Is The Time To Have A Confident Life

I woke up and it was the future. It was a new year. There were no hover cars, and no jet packs. But that is the only thing missing. 

When I was little, 2015 was the real future. I saw it on television, on the Jetson's. It was the time to be an adult with confidence and a life full of my childhood dreams. 

Growing up in the sixties and the seventies, 2015 seemed like the most advanced type of civilization possible. In fact, by now we were all supposed to be floating around in cars that parked themselves and cooking food in prepackaged containers in small magic boxes that radiated our food and wearing little bits of clothing to keep us warm and moving on stairs that silently carried us up to the second floor without lifting our knees. 

We were supposed to watch the world through screens the size of the wall of our house and never lift our arms to change the channel.  We were supposed to be able to tap our ears and check in with our loved ones who lived miles away and lose weight by a magic tube that would suction out the fat from our bottoms and our waistlines. We were supposed to have pills that killed disease and a free society where we could sleep with whomever we wanted to and where sex was freely talked about and openly participated in. 

Young people would have bright neon hair and the government would control our movements and watch everything we did, from their secret built in spy cameras hidden everywhere.     

I walked into my daughter’s room today, and she sat talking across from her video phone, chatting with a friend, and I tried to explain to her that when I was her age I would talk to my friends on a phone attached to a wall with a curly cord attached to the handset. And when someone else in the house wanted to make a call they would pick up the other line downstairs in the kitchen and yell at me to get off. 

She snickered at me, and her friend, on the screen of the tiny video phone, snickered at her, and they went on thumbing their other video devices while they talked in real synched time to twenty of their other close friends, sending images and thoughts and ideas across the stratosphere so fast that they forgot I was there before I even left the room. 

The future is now. There is no future for me when I will be older and will have that magical time when the moment will come that I can dream of a better life. My daughter is young, she is only beginning her teenage years. When I was her age I wondered what life would be like, and what I would be like. But now I am that person. I am the person I wanted to be, but I still feel like I should have more time, more future. And yet I have become one of those middle aged women who finds herself in that cliché time of life, looking in the mirror, saying to herself, “Wait, is this it? Don’t I have a little more future to look forward to?”

Ok, yes, I have grandchildren someday. I have another book to write, or maybe two or even three if I am lucky.  And I have a wonderful husband and yes, healthy family still alive, knock on laminated, plastic wood.  But I thought I would have that feeling of looking toward the future for my whole entire life, and this year, this new year, I woke up and realized, “Wait, the future is NOW.” 

If there is anything I want to accomplish, there is no “later,” there is no “I can do it when I am older” or “Maybe we should wait to take that vacation” or “lets go out tomorrow night.”

No, the future is now.  If I want to start a new business, to reinvent myself, to write a new book, to go to Paris, I have to do it today.  Because the future unfolds quickly, the moving floor unfolds before you without warning.  And yes, I sound old.  That’s what happens when you wake up and realize, “Wow, it’s the future.” 

Maybe there’s still time to invent the jetpack.  Lets get on that.  Before I wake up and its “back to the future” again.

Happy New Year.

Dr. Tammy Nelson is a sex and relationship therapist and can help you with your future, now.