Ten Years.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Ten years?

Ten years.

The question echoed back at me and physically stopped me from pacing, something I often do when I’m reading out loud.

I’m currently in the middle of Rachel Hollis’s, Girl, Stop Apologizing, and it was this particular query that literally stopped me in my tracks and caused me to think.

After the initial mental image of this popping into my head….

... I decided to sit myself down and really take the time to visualize the ideal version of myself and my life in ten years time.

What do you see yourself doing? Where do you see yourself living? What values are most important to you in ten years? Are you married? Do you have kids? Are you living your dream?

So I sat at my vanity, closed my eyes, and envisioned the most marvelous future.

And I got….

Nothing.

Nada.

I shook my head and thought, well maybe I’m just overthinking it.

Trying again, I took a deep breath and again got….

Nothing.

Imagining my future felt forced. Picturing myself in ten years felt impossible because I felt pressured to envision someone who was still figuring herself out, working to make sense of the present. It was a blank. It was like there was this mental roadblock that dead-ended and I couldn’t think of anything.

I could not see myself in ten years.

That notion scared me a little, and all I could think of was, well this can’t be good.

After expressing this concern over my inability to imagine my future to my journal, I then took my frustrations to my mom, who echoed my concerns with sadness in her eyes.

Well that’s too bad, she responded with a crestfallen expression.

I knew there was obviously something wrong with my ineptitude to imagine my own future, so I tried a new tactic, a different approach to this most perplexing question that I was having so much trouble answering.

So I go to Homer to take my mind off this panic-inducing question, and I find myself at a family friend’s beautiful timber frame home. I was sitting in the hot tub, sipping a mojito, relaxing after a day of halibut fishing that left my muscles sore, skin tanned (and maybe a little burned) from the sea sun, overlooking the beautiful Bay before me, and it was in that time, in that place, and in that moment in my life that I realized how to answer this question.

See, it was here in this distinct time in my day that I felt engulfed by these seemingly insignificant details that came together and made me realize that this was the kind of life I envisioned myself living in ten years, feeling this pure happiness.  

I think, in my head, when I first tried to envision my future self, I imagined living in this fantastical world, where nothing was off limits and I was living the most idealistic version of myself.

And the problem with imagining my future self is that I’m still learning who I am as a person. I’m still finding my values, my priorities, the things and people that make me the most happy, what sets my soul on fire, and I’m continuously growing into the woman I’m meant to be.

Perhaps that’s where this disconnect occurred. I don’t NOT see myself in ten years. I’m just living each day as best I can, and continuously discovering who I am, that I haven’t thought about what my future looks like because I’m enjoying my life as it happens now.

And as I do so, I’ll discover things about myself and the future life I do want.

Like having a clawfoot tub.

Editing my own magazine.  

Owning a cat. (or two)

Living in a home with a view of the Bay.  

Sitting court side at a Los Angeles Lakers game.

And of course, to be happy.

Daydreamer.

Ah savasana.

Ask anyone who does yoga if they would agree with me that savasana wasn’t one of the best poses ever.

Also known as “corpse pose”, it’s the relaxation posture that often takes place at the end of a yoga session. The final posture between being awake and asleep, one essentially lays there and lets the practice soak into the body as the session ends with focus on the breath.

Though I’ve been religiously attending yoga classes the past few months, I haven’t quite mastered the art of focusing solely on the breath, because during practice the other evening, I was lying in a cocoon of silk during savasana and my mind began to wander.

Where did it wander to? Well it wasn’t chores. Or work, or even house hunting. It had to do with men; specifically, one man.

See, I’ve always had this tendency to daydream. Time and place never mattered, I just sometimes have the inclination to be in my head and let my imagination go.

And the thing I fantasize and daydream about the most?

Men.

One could say it’s out of loneliness and longing, but I just have a wild imagination, and having never been in a relationship before, I often wonder what it would be like to go on fabulous dates, adventures, and to be wanted.

During shavasana, it was one particular man that worked his way into my mind, someone from my past whom I’ve just gotten over, a man who also randomly reached out to me the other day.

So yeah, he was on my mind, interrupting my practice with scandalous thoughts and causing me to lose focus during the one hour a day I set aside specifically to focus on myself and my breath!

Seriously so inconvenient.

I mean, come on man, you couldn’t have waited until I was at least settling down for the night in the privacy of my room?

I nonetheless let my mind wander down the path of fantasy and in all honesty, it felt so damn good. It was only after I could feel my heart pounding in my chest in which was supposed to be a period of rest and relaxation, that I snapped out of it.

What was I doing?

Long before I began taking up yoga, and long before I deleted his number once and for all, I had spent sooooo much time thinking about him, fantasizing about our life together and then eventually daydreaming about shaping him into the man I wanted when I realized he wasn’t giving me what I needed. This consequently got my heart broken after I came to the realization that I could not change who he was. Like most guys I meet, he lacked the courage and maturity to deal with emotional situations because it was uncomfortable and yet HERE I WAS letting this passive aggressive ghoster go and make appearances in the form of unrealistic fantasies in my head, yet again.

After realizing that I was most distracted, I went back to the breath.

A few months ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, because a few months ago, I didn’t know how to handle musings, especially the ones that brought about bouts of heart pounding feelings that had immature men attached to them.

I probably would’ve kept on with my unhealthy ways had it not been for Maxie McCoy’s book You’re Not Lost and a quote that lay between its pages.

We get to decide what the events in our life mean to us. No event means anything unless we attribute a meaning to it.

Instead of allowing this thought of him to ruminate in my head and cause me to relapse into imagining a future with a guy I know is so obviously not the one for me, I acknowledge its presence and let it go away on its own.

I imagine thoughts to be like clouds. And instead of ignoring the dark clouds that occasionally get mixed in, I accept their passing as they float by in the sky.

The solution that’s worked best for me and my efforts to move on doesn’t have to do with getting distracted by these feelings that put me in a negative state of mind, but to acknowledge that I’m having these thoughts in the first place and determine where they’re coming from.

In this particular case, it was the perfect storm of a relaxed state of mine, relative peace, and a desirous state of mind.

And how do we weather perfect storms?

We ride them out.