My Ten Future Lives

An Introduction to My Life – 2010

There are two cardinal rules by which I live my life …The first is that everything happens for a reason.

Or so my best friend told me in our third year at university.  While I have a feeling I was meant to reconcile this with her other, earlier, advice that you should never push a closed door twice, if it’s locked then there’s a reason, I’ve always been a bit of a cat burglar where destiny is concerned!

The first mantra can be seen to placate the extraneous circumstances, which tarnish the otherwise flawless world of a perfectionist, but I choose to take it with a more optimistic pinch of salt.  Everyone you meet, everything you do, will affect your world in some way, some time.  Social karma.  Things and people flying back into your world – circumstantial reincarnation.  Don’t they say that by the time you’re twenty you should’ve met your life partner?  Well I’m twenty-three, so surely by now my future has been mapped out somehow?  It’s just a question of finding out who will jet back into my life, how, and when …

The second rule is an ironic reality.  Whenever you imagine the outcome of a situation, your prediction will be wrong.

This realisation comes not from the words of others, but from bitter life experience.  I’ve always been a dreamer.  But while my creative thought-processes were of great virtue at the age of eight, in my early twenties, my furtive imagination has proven more of a disappointment and hindrance.

‘How mature and pragmatic!’ I hear you gush … ‘How I wish I could have as much self-belief as this girl, and have my life find it’s own course without futile, and ultimately distressing daydreams destined not to come true.’

But what I’m yet to tell you, is that I’m a lawyer; at least in the academic sense of the word.  And if three years of studying law at one of the world’s best universities has taught me anything, it’s that every rule has a loophole, and thus my second mantra is no less flawed than the laws of the land of which silver tongues make child’s play.

So far as imagining perfect futures is concerned … well there are a number of means by which one can ensure that they might still come true.  And so I can reassure myself that I haven’t forfeited all possibility of future happiness, by frivolously imagining a wedding, a career, or an Olympic medal.

The loopholes for this rule are many and varied.  From internal narration of the daydream in another language – because, realistically, why would I ever chose my wedding to be conducted in German?!  To the inclusion of people who, in reality, simply wouldn’t or couldn’t, ever be there.

In my head, I make Mr. Perfect look slightly different, or give him a different name or vocation to my real ideal man, and so the daydream remains as harmless as if it never were.  And therefore, just as possible to happen, with the right people, in the right place, in the right language, in the future.

Welcome to my ten imaginary future lives …

A xxx

© C-C Lester 2010

Continue to Chapter One (Life One) of My Ten Future Lives

Continue to Chapter Two (Life Two) of My Ten Future Lives