It’s been a hard lesson that had to be learned through sleeplessness and anxious mornings when my mind ran through the numbers and woke up to the terror that promises I’d made to my children and wife might not be kept.

I would look forward and instead of seeing a version of myself acting in a future that looked a lot like today — only doing things I thought would be more fun — I’d be in a nowhere space., staring into a gray wall without texture or substance, yet solid and there.

It’s why we took the gift cards we’d been carelessly saving for tomorrow and used them today.

It’s why we bought toilet paper we didn’t need yet.

But it’s all futile. There’s nothing there.

It makes you think you’re on a cliff, looking into nothing.

Even that, though, strangely suggests something that isn’t there, flavored by the boiling pall of anxiety.

If you really think about it, you’ll see there is nothing yet. There is no “and so it is written” until after the fact.

Rather, you sit on a crossroads of time and space like the tip of a ball point pen on a clean sheet of paper, not knowing what will come next. A line? A picture? A word? A scribble of a shadow of a thought?

It is possible you might know, but once you realize that knowing is based on some idea of what has been that’s being projected forward, you might be lucky and see that you have the power to drag and push the inky instrument forward in any direction.

You can make anything.

It’s an amazing moment to know that power is there, that you are not trapped by your own story.

You are not the future you have imagined, but could be any future you can imagine.