Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

I have been directing my company Matrix Software for going on forty years, so stepping down from that position is well, of course, a change. How much of a change I am about to find out, but I am beginning to feel it will be a greater change than I had imagined, which is fine, because my imagination has seldom been a true guide to my eventual reality.

And I am reminded once again, since I am in it now, that change is wavelike, and not static. Change comes in waves and washes over me, at times submerging (suffocating) me in the past and at others going flood-tide into what I guess is to be my future. I don't know it yet because it is so new.

And I begin to see that this whole I idea that "I" will proceed into the future as I planned is just bogus. The "I" that I think will proceed is made up of the past, not the future. It does not know the future. I will be forming a new "I" all-over-again as the future unfolds, so I best get down from my high horse and just dive in, smell the roses, open the windows, and feel the warm summer breezes. The future is not freeze-dried, but fresh and unknown. It brings life and experience. I can see that this new life I will now live is going to be an experience, and not just what I imagined or expected.

At first I thought all this change was just tiring (and it is), but I am beginning to see that it is not so much that I am tired, as it is that I need space and time to absorb the changes, and lying down, taking a nap, or even just resting for a moment in a quiet corner, is what is required.

The upshot is that where before I thought I had my future after Matrix Software kind of mapped out in my mind so that I could see its path (the road I will take and all of that), I now see my mentally imagined future landmarks vanishing, one by one. There is no such map.

All in all I am grateful that the future still holds surprises for me and that I can't predict it verbatim, word for word. Somehow the future manages to keep its freshness and my attempts to unveil it or to peer into its fog are mostly unsuccessful. I am just going to have to live and experience it as it unfolds, moment by moment. I have to actually go into the future.