What would you do if you had limitless time, and no fear?

I heard this question the other day, and it hit hard. For as long as I can remember I have been both hyperaware of and utterly terrified by the idea that my lifespan is not limitless. My mortality has always felt like an inescapable weight, hovering over every ambition.

What hit hard this time was that the question didn’t seem impossible to consider.

In a way, I have more time right now than I will ever again have. Granted, if I had that thought in my 20’s I would have had even more time–but maybe that’s not true. My 20’s were spent building my life–grad school, career, marriage, moving. My 30’s were spent building my family, my 40’s bringing that family to independence. Those were two decades of non-stop work. No time to think. Sometimes, no time to breathe. But since the girls have gone off to college my time has expanded. Sometimes it stretches itself out in a vast and terrifying openness.

What would I do if I had limitless time, and no fear?

My earliest fear was of nuclear war. Living in Queens, New York City, in between two major airports the planes flying overnight were the soundtrack of my nightmares. Was that the bomb? How about that one? It didn’t help that my history teacher, in junior high, informed us that if a nuclear missile hit Manhattan we would have about 40 minutes before we were all incinerated. It’s interesting that nuclear destruction is still a threat, so many years after the Cold War ended, but I’m not as afraid of it as I used to be. I’ve given up allowing myself to be terrorized by the prospect of things that I cannot control. The pandemic taught me that.

Other fears, too, have receded, as I have run the race and answered the Big Questions: Will I be able to support myself? Will I find a good husband? Will I be able to have a family? Will my children be healthy? Will my children be able to fly the nest? I have done, biologically and evolutionarily, what I was put on this earth to do. I have raised two beautiful children into functional adults, and my husband and I have thus replaced ourselves. While I’m sure there is more for me to do to support them, that’s more or less what I am now: support. I’m no longer a guardian, I’m a consultant. As they sit in my living room, home for the Thanksgiving holiday with their two new kittens and a college friend, I am happier than I have been since they came home for the latest hurricane scare, but with the knowledge that in less than a week they will away again, leaving me with lots of time and a lot less fear.

So what would I do with limitless time and no fear?

I had an exchange with my therapist about a month ago, because I was experiencing some renewed death anxiety after the children left for college. The last time I experienced this level of existential dread, my kids were little. It dissipated after my therapist had me write my obituary as if I’d died at 99 and then as if I died yesterday. I wrote the 99-year-old one within a week. I took me months to write the other one. I just didn’t want to think about it. It was my biggest fear, to leave my children without a mother. So my therapist made me confront that fear, over and over again, until I had the strength to write the darn thing, and this led to the conclusion that I was experiencing death anxiety because I wasn’t really living.

Now I have the time to be truly living, and this anxiety has returned largely because I don’t have a plan. I have always, as long as I can remember, had a plan. Kindergarten led to 1st grade, then 2nd, 3rd, and so on. As the seasons repeated, so did the structure of the years. In junior high I began to plan for high school; in high school, for college; in college, for graduate school; in graduate school, for career; in career, for family. And then family continued that seasonal progression: birth, 1st birthday, 2nd, 3rd, preschool, kindergarten–an echo of my own years but only in a different dimension, as mother. But with the graduation of my youngest the progression of years is no longer mine. I don’t plan the schedule. I don’t pursue the career. All of the big changes to come will be in my children’s lives more than mine–graduations, relationships, weddings, births and all the milestones that come thereafter. Then my children will find themselves in a different dimension, and I will find myself further and further from the center of their lives.

That’s okay. That’s good. That’s right. Not being the center of their existence allows me to be the center of my own. There are no pre-ordained rhythms any more. There is no five-year-plan. I’m just kind of cruising down the road, nowhere to go, no real destination.

It’s terrifying.

It’s freeing.

It’s terrifying and freeing.

I used to tell my kids what I learned a long time ago in history class–that in order to obtain security, people give up a certain degree of freedom. I have lived, up until now, a very secure life, with severe limits on my freedom. And now that those limits are gone, my life is still secure–I can spend the rest of my time on earth in my house, in my town, with my husband and my friends, and just . . . be.

Or, I can do what I would do if I had limitless time, and no fear.

What would that be?

The future stretches ahead, a vast expanse. I can continue to teach, and read, and write, and travel. I can spend time with my husband, my mother, my friends and, when they are available, my children. Is that it, though? Teach, travel, write, hang out with loved ones? None of those things seem very timeless or fearless.

So on this Thanksgiving eve, I wonder: what would I do if I had limitless time and no fear? What would you do?