Does this mean I have to go alone?  Step off the cliff all by myself…  Actually it does.  You have to make your own decisions, go it alone and face the consequences good or bad.  You better have your head together on a daily basis to be ready for the tough decisions of life, and the unexpected which comes at us without warning. When the green lights turns red mysteriously, do we blow through it, maintain civility and stop.  When the dog gets out do we chase it, fearing it may run out into the street, or do we stand still and call him, hoping he will return.  Choices come at us night and day.  Are we ready, or do we blow it and refuse to listen to one more problem from anyone, or answer the phone one more time.

Then there are the really big choices–career, children, life partner?  Sometime we don’t make the choices.  It just happened–oops.  Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the pre-planning is the choice before the emergencies, the inexplicable, the ever-looming future.  I have always come from the place of let’s heal now.  Let’s get the paper due next month done today.  (I once completed a paper so far in advance I had a hard time finding it to turn it is.)  I guess I live from the space of–Girl Scouts motto–Always be ready.  For right or for wrong, it is what I can do to insulate my ego from the unexpected.  They are the old-fashioned rules that I know so well.  Always keep your clothes in tip-top shape, your house is ready for guests–who know Mr. Dreamy might appear and need a place to stay:)  Enough money to survive at least through the month. Etc.  You know the drill.  And then we face the existential future.  But somehow I have assuaged my future for me.  I have done all I can do, before I take the step off the cliff, and then it is in God’s hands.  I have done all I can do, a mere mortal.

Somehow whatever the future holds, the people who enter doomed airplanes, a car accident, a heart attack, these were destined and no amount of clean underwear can fix those terminal events, and in that case we can die with personal honor–a clean slate, a life in-order.  Good-bye world.  The next world awaits and we are prepared because we were prepared.  We know how to handle life, wherever it may be.  Hopefully we don’t have to keep repeating this one to get it right.  We are right.