Do you remember how we used to sit down at those job interviews, and one of the standard, go-to questions would always come up?
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Of course, back then, when someone gave you a canned question, there were all sorts of canned answers. And so the game was played.
But now that we are in the thick of a strife-ridden pandemic, it takes a little wind out of the old five-year projections, doesn’t it? I guess if I answered it now, the word “I hope” would be at the beginning of every sentence.
I hope I am alive. I hope I am healthy. I hope all my family and friends are alive and healthy. And it would go on from there. While I’ve always wished for these things, my perspective has shifted, I would say.
The five-year question, indeed.
My mom, god rest her soul, used to be a worrier. Not just any kind of a worrier, but a world-class worrier. She’d fret about the weather, what to have for dinner, what to do if the car runs out of gas, even though the tank was full. The words “what if” were always on her mind, but in a worrying kind of way. She would worry about us kids, endlessly. As we went out the door, it was never “Have fun!” It was always, “Be careful.”
Oh, and careful I became. Careful, I still am. And wouldn’t you know it? The worry-gene got passed right on down to me. But that’s another blog.
Somewhere along the line, someone must have told my mom, “Lucy. In 100 years, it won’t make a bit of difference. Not to anyone.” So then, for a while, she started saying it too. “In a 100 years, it just won’t matter.”
Although this is mostly true, mom didn’t believe it. The phrase didn’t help her worrying. Dementia took hold of her, later in life. It took away a lot of things about her, and for the most part, her worrying went away too. If you had asked her the five-year question, prior to all of that, she would have never hoped for that future. Who would?
Five years is a long time. Five years is a short time. If I go back five years, my mom would still be alive, and I’d still visit her every day. We would sing Three Blind Mice, each day, without fail.
Time can be funny when you start adding it up. If I could jump back to a time when mom was my age, I would be 16 years old. I would have just gotten my driver’s license, and would’ve been asking to use the car every chance I got.
And as I’d go out the door, keys in hand, mom would call after me. “Be careful.” I can see myself waving my hand over my shoulder, bounding through the screen door, and off across the street, to where my little black VW was parked.
Mom was probably watching the whole time, worrying, wondering about my five-year plan.
Time. It isn’t really a thing, it is a concept. While we measure it with minutes, and days and years, it happens differently to all of us. We all know that time can be fast, or it can be slow. It can pass in a blink of an eye. Or seem like forever. The feeling of time is affected by the circumstances which surround us.
Five minutes of burning your hand lasts a lot longer than five minutes eating chocolate dipped in peanut butter. Our world, our being, shapes our time.
So the five-year question? Where do I see myself in five years?
I guess that all depends on what I’m doing, minute by minute, until I get there.
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“They say I’m old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!”
― Dr. Seuss
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“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
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“Time is an illusion.”
― Albert Einstein
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