It has happened to anyone to stop and think about the future, and most people have probably felt a void. That void is fear.
The future begins to frighten during adolescence.
It does so by involving the choices we make in the present that we hope will lead to the desired results for tomorrow, but also by implicating the past, over which we don’t have any control anymore. We reconsider the past to learn from it and not to make the same mistakes again.
We don’t exactly know when the future begins, and marking the beginning would be impossible.
All we know is that, during adolescence, we must take the right path if we don’t want life to make it impossible for us to reach those goals we have set for ourselves.
Along with this knowledge comes a series of doubts about our abilities, and if, on the one hand, we can’t wait to take flight, on the other, the fear of failure terrifies us. Perhaps, we can imagine our future in many different ways because we have many talents, we can have a precise dream, or we don’t have any idea of what we would like to do. In every case, our fear of the future never goes away. Even if we reach a point where we are satisfied with what we have, our memory will always tend to remind us of all the times we took one direction instead of another, determining what was then our future and what is now the present.
Time can be our best friend when we consider the events in our lives as opportunities for growth and change. It can also turn into an enemy when we begin to regret some choices or when we don’t resign ourselves to the tragic events in our lives. So the future isn’t the only thing that scares us: the present that was the future years ago and the past that has reappeared today can also be scary.
We can’t predict anything in our life, and our possibility of intervention is limited. What the human being can do, is to move according to directions that he believes will take him where he wants to go.
Eleonora Medda 3BL
