Back to the Future

#139: Wondering for Certain

I always saw myself as a future person. One teacher in High School asked us if we thought we were more of future people (always looking forward to what is ahead), past people (always looking back to the good times had), or present people (enjoying the here and the now.) And that was the answer in my head. Definitely a future person. At the age of 14 or 15, I already dreamt of graduating from Business school with honors, then moving on to take my MBA outside of the country after a couple of years of working. I may not have known at that time what company I wanted to work for or what an office job exactly entailed but that was the path. That was the future. And I was looking forward to it.

I guess it was easy for me to look toward the future that time given that I was a dark scrawny kid with oversized teeth. While normal girls would have guys offering to fan them if a drop of sweat even threatened to appear on their brows, or begging to carry their bags to the point of looking like snatchers, I was wailing over getting a math score of 16/20 in one short quiz or wondering what else to do as Vice-President of the Science Club. Eew. (A bigger eww probably is the fact that I had been a Science Club member since 5th grade. The lone girl member. It was not that I loved science. It may be because I felt more confident in the company of dorks.) Certainly, the future will be so much better.

And so the future would morph into the present, and then to the past. By God's grace I was able to graduate Magna Cum Laude from the business school of The University of the Philippines under full scholarship from Procter & Gamble. I moved on from one company to the next to find myself in The Coca-Cola Company where, as I was making plans to tackle something more hazy, more flexible and more challenging again (a.k.a 'the future'), I started learning the beauty of both looking back and living in the present.

Why am I learning these just now?

Why now, when in 30 days, I'll be leaving my life, my family, my friends to fly off to Sydney for my MBA? Why now, when I'm just 7 days away from turning 28 (i.e., undeniably in my late 20s)?

I feel like I have become a past, present and future person all in one. All at once. And as I think about my teacher's question, I am left to wonder what my answer to him would be now... and if there really should be any choice at all.