I'm not going to spoil the movie for you but... if you get a chance to see it... it's on Netflix Canada. The basic idea is... a "I'll do it later" type of guy, Teddy, is advised by a stranger not to wait and gives him a tin can for his wedding. A can that he is told not to open for 10 years. The next morning, after his wedding, he wakes up and is completely befuddled. Everything is different... the house is fully furnished... his wife is 18 weeks pregnant. A year has flown by. And then a little while later, another year flies by. Teddy gets a fast-forward view of how his tendency to procrastinate has impacted his life, his marriage, and those of his friends. What happens at 10 years? Well, you'll have to watch the movie!
Heads up... this is not a deep movie. It only got 50% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, although viewers gave it more like 6/10. But it did get me thinking about how life is short. Really... in the grand scheme of things, it is incredibly short. And we never know what is coming down the pipe. Will we be here in a year? Will our parents, friends, coworkers be here in a year? We don't know. We assume they will be. We assume that we have all the time in the world. But all we need to do is read the news to know that... it's a big assumption.
As a procrastinator... the words "later", "tomorrow", "next week", "next month", "next year" show up a LOT in my internal (and even external) conversations. I don't feel like. I don't want to. Now is not the right time. It's too hard. I don't know how to do it. I don't have time. Always pushing whatever it is out into the future.
As if I will have more time in the future? Seriously? If I don't have time for it now... what makes me think I will have time for it in the future? The idea that life will somehow magically calm down in the future? When the reno is done... then I'll have time? When the trip is done... then I'll have time? Nope.
Or, that somehow, it will get less hard, less confusing, less uncomfortable in the future? Whoo boy... that's a big one. Because oftentimes the opposite is the case. Things get MORE uncomfortable the longer we push them out. And they get more confusing because they are still hard... and we are filled with more uncertainty because we were so sure it would get easier but it's not and... what the heck!
And then there's the excuse that "now is not the right time"... I'm really not sure what the "right time" would look like. When I feel like it? Or I want to do it? That might have worked when I was a kid... when you could scream "I don't want to!" and you might get away with it. But as an adult... there are literally a gazillion things that we don't want to do but we actually HAVE to do. Like prepping taxes and paying taxes. Or vacuuming the house. Or taking the car in for an oil change. I mean... really... we don't HAVE to do any of those things... but then we can pay the price for those later with a busted car, the tax man on our heels and rampant health issues and allergies due to a filthy house.
There are also the bigger things... on the scale of dreams and visions of what we want to do. Things like take that trip to England. Learn Spanish. Walk the Camino. Drive across Canada. Start our own business. Write a book. Next year. When the time is right. When we have the money. When... when... when... Sometime... just not now.
I wonder sometimes what my Long Story Short movie would look like. If I jumped forward a year every 10 minutes. What would I find? Would I find regrets? Would I find unfulfilled dreams? And if I could see that... would I do anything differently now?
I just did a little exercise where I mapped out my life over the last 10 years - what was happening in April each year. And what would I be thinking as I made that jump 1 year forward... repeatedly. I think I'd get whiplash! There have been big shifts in my life. Moving cities. Changing jobs. Deaths in the family. Illness and injuries. Dreams unfulfilled. A lot of life-changing events.
At the same time, there were trips, house purchases, dreams coming to fulfilment, books being written and published. Gardens planted. Despite everything else that was going on... some dreams did still come to fruition. And for that I am grateful.
Now though... what would my next 10 years, in 1 year jumps look like? What are the dreams that I have now that... if I ended up 10 years in the future with them undone... I would wonder what the heck I had been doing!?
I guess that is the question... because we don't know how long we have. Or how long the people in our lives have. So seize the day. Seize the moment. Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Tomorrow never comes.
No comments:
Post a Comment