Seeing Red…

This time last year I faced an uncertain future.

This time this year I face an uncertain future.

It isn’t even as if I haven’t spent the last year or so not trying to make it certain. It’s just that I think I’ve come to believe (at last) that the future isn’t certain. So who knows what future I’ll be facing this time next year?

There goes my last little bit of the arrogance of my youth, be seeing you – not that I should have been clinging to it at my age.

And then, outside the January wind is howling and inside me the wind is howling just as fiercely.

As a character from my imagination once said:
‘Everything is chance. Life is chance. Death is chance. Chance is chance.”
And indeed it is.

I can’t understand it.
I had it all worked out.
I’d prepared.
Nothing was left to chance.

Wrong! Everything is chance.
Sometimes it simply makes me see Red.

I was talking to Red this morning. Red’s a friend of mine, he’s been hanging around for a while now. He’s the sort of friend that you need when things aren’t going the way that you'd planned them. He doesn’t have many answers but at least he makes the questions easier to ask, loosening the tongue just enough so that I can face the way things seem to have turned out so far.

“This was my year Red.” I explained to him, “This was the year I’d planned it all for.”

I won’t go into the details but at one time it seemed so doable. I’d planned you see – both financially and life, even to the extent that I’d managed to bring everything to fruition at the same time – family, house, financial security. Everything came together at fifty-five. At fifty-five I would have choice, moderate security, and freedom.

Red just smiled at me. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to say anything, and anyway - he didn’t have anything to say.

Red’s like that, no answers but sometimes a solution – well, at least he’s not a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inches tall white rabbit like some... well not yet at least.