IMAGINE A FUTURE ....

Imagining a future that includes love is easier than imagining a future without it.
Granted, neither may come true -- dreams more often die a lonely, forgotten death as life and time overtake them -- but imagining a personal future where love is a central figure and has a key role is much easier to embrace than one in which no love ever will even visit.
And yet for those of us who once had love and lost it, we must face that almost certain fate. Because, no matter how much we hope, no matter how much we try to dream, our hopes and dreams cannot conjure up a way for us to return, even for a brief moment or two, to that time when love was the center of our world, the focus of our lives.
You see, it is easier to dream of a future that includes love before love truly enters our lives, and so much harder to dream of a future of love when the love of our lives has walked away. Even though the odds of love entering our lives is the same as a lost love returning, it just is more difficult to imagine the one we love coming back than it is to imagine someone we love first entering our sad, sorry lives.
Blame it on experience. Is it not easier to imagine any wonderful thing happening to us -- winning the lottery, getting the perfect job, becoming someone famous -- before we ever even get close than it is to imagine after having gotten near to what we want, but having that elusive goal slip through our fingers?
After all, isn't the most human reaction to such things: Well, that was my best chance, and it got away. I'll never be that lucky again?
The poet was right when he said it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, but it is also true that once you have loved and lost it is hard to believe love will ever return to your heart again. If for no other reason than the odds simply are stacked infinitely high against it. You rolled the romantic dice and lost.
Maybe this is because there is some truth to the belief that love visits us once and only once. And if, like me, you blow that chance, love is not going to make a return visit.
So why imagine that it would?