Unimagined Futures

Another one of many thoughts that came while reading Blue Ticket.

So we have roads-not-taken that we know about, and we mourn those lost dreams or imagined futures. But Blue Ticket brings up the idea of the unimagined future. On page 92, she writes:

Even though I had thought often about becoming a doctor, becoming an emissary had never crossed my mind. There were some futures I had never imagined for myself. But then not so long ago this would have been one of them, too.

Emissaries are the government officers who keep the system in place, and the doctors—in this case—are psychiatrists. So she imagined and rejected becoming a psychiatrist—something she could have done—though looks back wistfully on the thought as she realizes while looking at an emissary that she never considered becoming one. She can’t mourn or regret what she never considered in the first place until she considers it.

We can only mourn the imagined futures, not the unimagined ones, so they hold no power, no ability to bother us or get under our skin.

It’s a meditation on wants and how those wants feed our sadness; a musing on the Buddhist Four Noble Truths and the lack of suffering when our mind hasn’t latched onto wanting a particular future.

Except once our mind latches onto a particular want how do you release it if you don’t fulfill it when the mind mourns our unlived lives? Of course, yes, the answer could be the Eightfold Path, but I put that frame of Buddhism around it. The reality is so much harder; releasing our imagined lives and accepting that we have an equal amount of unmourned, unimagined lives diluting that larger sadness.