By Trebbe Johnson and Silvia Talavera

As children we did it naturally: imagined ourselves in some future role: veterinarian, movie star, Arctic explorer. How we got there didn’t matter. We just all of a sudden were somewhere, doing some thing, being Some One. It was a beautiful and important practice.

Unfortunately, as we age, that portal to envisioning and stepping into our own future tends to close down. Sometimes it seems so firmly sealed we often hardly know if it even exists. Yet it does, and it is just as accessible as it ever was, inviting us to step through into a shimmery, blurry, world where our future beckons, full of potential. Entering that portal can inspire us to think a little bigger, imagine a little more creatively, and act a little more decisively. All it requires is letting our own vision arise and inspire us, no less than it did when we were little Arctic explorers and veterinarians.

We can use it to encourage ourselves to keep going (or embark on) some project or practice that we keep postponing or aren’t tending to with the dedication we’d like to summon forth. We can use it to determine the course of the rest of our life.

It could work like this: You imagine yourself five years in the future. How are you living? What do you eat? What is your relationship with your community? Who are your friends? How do you handle difficult challenges?

It’s important not to get bogged down in details. We don’t have to figure everything out, like: Will I be with the same partner? I don’t know if I can afford to live in the city I’d really like to move to. What will be happening with climate change? In five years I’ll be too old to do what I wish I’d done ten years ago.

This is a portal into imagination and envisioning. It’s not a business plan.

There are certain times in life when envisioning our future has special poignancy: when we’re dealing with a life-threatening illness (our own or that of a loved one) or when we’re in our elder years. It is at these times that the overwhelming question: Will I even be alive then? can loom large.

And yet, it is at these very times that this exercise of envisioning our own future can be most meaningful, for we realize that we have a different relationship to time than we once did. We recognize that the future is not a limitless expanse, but a finite path. It is a perfect opportunity to ask: How, then, can I be most fully my Self every day, every moment with every act I undertake?

In his book, A Year to Live, the late leader in helping people to die consciously, Stephen Levine, invites readers into “a healing process that allows a gradual completion of all that lies behind and a clear-eyed entrance into whatever may lie ahead.” He offers reflections, topics of conversation, and mindful reviews of life as a way of choosing how one wants to truly live the rest of life.

However, as Steven Foster and Meredith Little have taught, and as so many thousands of us all over the world have experienced many times over, the work of wilderness rites of passage opens up even more multi-dimensional practices for taking on this big project. Speaking to and receiving guidance from nature, taking walks with people who aren’t physically with us, and creating our own ceremonies of transition, we enter into new states of being, of knowing, and of loving.

Who am I today? Am I the One I Want to Be? Let me approach that portal right now this moment.

Info on our Elder’s Journey for Women can be found here