By Pattie Mihalik

Play along with me and picture this scenario.

Let’s say you are in a new city, one you have never visited before. You don’t know a thing about the place.

You find yourself walking down a long unfamiliar street.

What’s around the next corner?

You might guess what’s around that corner.

Or you might hope for what you will find around that corner.

But you have no idea what you will experience when you turn that corner, right?

By now you are probably thinking, duh. How can I know what I’ll find if I’ve never been here before?

Yet in real life, so many of us make assumptions about what we’ll experience in the future.

We can’t say we’ve ever been to the future. We can’t claim we know a thing about what we will experience there.

Yet we make pronouncements as if we do indeed know what the future will hold.

Young folks say things like, “I’ll never love anyone again as much as I love the guy who just broke up with me. Never!”

You can’t tell the brokenhearted person someone better just might very well be around the next corner.

They tend to think what exists today will always be because all they see is “now.”

While we can recognize young love often follows that train of thought, it’s not just younger people who fail to think of tomorrow’s potential.

Older, smarter folks often fall into the trap of thinking today’s misery will always be part of their lives.

That was the case with a 50-year-old woman I’ll call Lucy. Right before this pandemic hit, she lost the job she had for 10 years when the company downsized.

Her search for a new job only proved how tough it is to find work in her field because communication jobs are drying up.

Things got even tougher when the pandemic forced more companies to lay off workers.

Lucy fell into a deep depression. “I’ll never get another job at my age. I’ll never be able to pay my mortgage,” she lamented.

She had no faith in the foreign country we call “the future.”

I told her what exists now won’t always be the case. “Keep sending out resumes and reaching out to contacts. A job will turn up somewhere.”

Lucy wasn’t buying it. Her unemployment benefits helped but didn’t cover her expenses as she went deeper in debt.

It was tough. And she didn’t find a fast fix. But much to her amazement, she did land a job with benefits.

Yet even then, her negative thinking had her worried her new job wouldn’t last.

The foreign land we call the future is a place we don’t know. It’s out of our control. So worrying about what may or may not happen won’t control a thing.

I believe five long months of this terrible pandemic has had many people drowning in a sea of negativity.

We need hope.

We need to know around the next corner might be much sunnier times.

When I’m feeling the loneliness of social isolation there are times when I start to lose hope because I don’t know when I can get back to life as I once knew it.

When I voice that thought to my daughter, she says, “Around the next corner I believe there will be vaccine that will help. Hang in there.”

That’s become our family mantra. Hang in there. Around the next corner things will get better.

While it’s easy to give into negative thinking when month after month we can’t be with friends and family as we once did, I know with all certainly there is nothing static about life.

And I believe with all my heart that around the next corner waits new opportunity and joy.

Why do I believe this?

Because that’s proven to be true so many times in the past.

The day a doctor told me there was no hope for my husband who had just been diagnosed with his third case of cancer, I was filled with despair.

Until the next day, that is.

I took Andy to Foxchase, where we learned there was a treatment that would keep him alive for two or three years.

By then I figured another treatment would be available, and I was right.

Instead of the instant death the first poor excuse for a doctor predicted, we had 12 and a half glorious years with Andy.

When he did pass away, I had to cling to the lesson I learned from Andy’s illness.

That lesson was to live life with hope and with the certainty that the future would bring more than better days. It would bring joy we could not imagine.

While it’s not easy to navigate the lonely walk of being a widow, I learned to trust in the future.

I walked each day with faith and with trust, believing in the potential of tomorrow.

Yet, for all my belief back then, I never anticipated the childlike joy that came my way when I found the courage to move to Florida.

One would think that when someone has that experience, she would never drown in negativity.

COVID-19 has gotten me down at times. But I pull back and remember about the unknown potential of tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a land we cannot visit ahead of time.

We can just trust.

Contact Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net.