Dear Future Me

  Getting emails from old friends is always nice, but what a surprise to find an email that I sent to myself last year, only to be delivered exactly one year later.  It began "Dear Future Me".  This letter from my past to an older version of me had only one line.... "What have you accomplished over the past year?"   I thought this was rather brilliant as it prompted me to reflect on the year and what I had or had not accomplished.  My children were quick to interrupt my quiet reflections and point out that my one sentence email was lame and lacked details.  You can always count on your children for brutal honesty.  They educated me on how I should have talked about what I was doing a year ago and described what that day was like.  So.... with that being said, my children and I crafted our next letter... "Dear Future Us"

  The letter began by explaining that it was close to midnight on a school night and my children should be in bed.  Instead, they were piled in my bed demonstrating their version of Cirque du Soleil acrobats and tossing my daughter into the ceiling fan.  We listed details about our day so we would know exactly what was going on when we read about it a year from now.  After I finished my typing, my daughter typed in that she is very cool, making it look like I had written these words and then added several smiley faces and hearts.  My son took his turn and added some unknown statement and hit "send" before we could read it.   Giving only subtle hints that would drive my daughter mad, he left her to believe that a year from now we will open a letter that shows my son loved me much more than my daughter did.  What a terrible, yet typical thing to do his sister.  He smiled at this brilliant plan as she desperately tried to retract a message that would wait in the ethers for a year. 

  Unable to retrieve the mystery mail that was resting silently in a distant server waiting for delivery, I thought about the power of such a tool.  Had I known better so very long ago, I should have drafted the following letter to be delivered to the future me at twenty, thirty and forty years of age.