I started to get sleepy and my mind began to wander as I played games tonight. My mind wandered back to just over a year ago, I am not sure if it was the nostalgia from the game or what. I just remember my life was on course and I was happy and confident with my future. That got me thinking about how naïve I was to think my life was all planned out back then. I began to dwell on how the future can change in a moment, and at how suddenly Dan’s future was cut short. We discuss the future so often and people don’t even realize it. ‘I’ll clean that up later’, ‘I’ll let you use that later’, ‘can we play later’, ‘if we work on this, we can buy this later’. Recently, I had explained to Felix/Daniel the value of ‘stuff’. He didn’t understand that the value of an object is not based on the purchase value, but rather on the replacement value. A bike you bought 4 years ago may have cost you $400. It’s no longer worth that and may only have the value of maybe $200 now. But the replacement value of getting a new bike could be as high as $600. Suddenly, trading it away for $200 doesn’t seem like such a smart idea when you realize you have to dish out $600 to get a new one when instead you could save $200 cash and buy what you want, saving yourself having to pay out an unnecessary $400. When he realized this, we started to set up an idea. He decided he wanted to save up for the things he wanted instead of trading for them. He set a goal of a bike at first, and this goal kept changing. He wanted a bike, he wanted a new phone, he wanted a new gaming console, he wanted a new skateboard…I had agreed to help him save it all up. He asked that I make sure he didn’t spend it, and that way he could eventually buy what he wanted. He was supposed to start saving it in the next couple weeks. All of this was planning for the future. It was another case of ‘later’. That ‘later’ will never come. Just like ‘We will play Eternal Sonata later’. ‘I will let you use my laptop later’. ‘Prove you can take care of this, and I will get you your own later’, ‘We can play Risk later’. I find myself regretting all the ‘later’s I asked of him. He wouldn’t hold it against me, he was just happy that I’d spend that time with him. When I said later, I meant it. I would always do what I said I’d do…later. Last night I installed that game I promised I would, the one I told him he’d have to prove he could take care of a computer before I’d install it ‘later’. Tonight, I played Eternal Sonata again…I could just imagine him playing it with me. Just last week I told him ‘we can play it later’. I will keep my promise. I will play a game of risk, play some gamecube and minecraft. And I will remember that he was supposed to be there doing all these ‘later’s with me. Sometimes…later is just a little too late.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 04:06:23 +0000
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