Succumb, Or Keep Living?

Every day, now, it's a choice.  I can loll about on the couch, take pills for pain, become lethargic, and basically just succumb to this whole thing...

Or else I can plan things to do, not just for the sake of filling space, but things that I'd really like to do.

Within limits, of course...

But it's still this choice.  Do I succumb, or do I keep living?

In order to keep living I have to put a future there.  Quite literally, days that I haven't made any plans for are days that I didn't "put there".  These no plan days arrive, and because I've not put anything there, then there's nothing for me to do.

Maybe I can come up with things to do on the fly, but it's not the same.

I have to put my future out there.  I have to want to get things done in the future.  I have to keep putting out this vision of having things I want to accomplish in the future.

Otherwise, I have no future.

One of the things that I put into my future is this blog.  When I started it, there was an aspect to it that I felt put my future out there.  I could do this, no matter what.  I could do this after I retired.  I could do this very easily into the indeterminate future.

And so, here I am, blogging.  I put this future for myself out here, quite some time ago.

I have resurrected an old hobby that I had abandoned over the past few years: amateur radio.  I spent a week planning how I would move one of my transceivers upstairs, how I would hook up the antennas from the basement to this room, and all the steps I'd have to accomplish to get this done.

It was a very physically draining set of chores that I had to get done, but in the end I got them all done, and now I've reconnected to a whole bunch of people through the radio that I haven't seen or talked to in years.  It's been very enlivening for me.  It's been a real shot in the arm.

But I had to dream up the idea, and put this future out there first.

Lately I've been putting more things into my future, and each one of these things gives me more life, more of sense of there actually being a future for me.

At the very least, I have things to look forward to.

No matter how anyone might want to look at this philosophically, there is a very powerful force in human purpose.  It can be tapped and energized if it's true enough.  Having a purpose in life is what makes us come alive, no matter how seemingly petty and mundane that purpose might be.  And having a purpose for each day gives the day a life of its own.

So if your doctor ever tells you that you have three to six months left to live, you'll have to decide whether to blindly succumb to his vision of your future, or if you'll just simply go the other way.