I had a great birthday party, thanks to my wife Kimberly and a bunch of people she recruited.

Thanks to all who attended, I connected and reconnected with lots of family and friends. We enjoyed good food, danced through the evening to the music played by a great live band, received lots of wishes and prayers, had good fun and took lots of pictures to memorialize the event.

In the days following the party, we talked about how wonderful the party was.

And, now what?

Well, for one thing, I have started wondering what will my 90th birthday be like?

Where will I be health wise, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and financially on my 90th birthday?

Which old and new friends and family members will be around to attend my 90th birthday party?

What new skills I will have on my 90th birthday that I did not have on my 60th?

To me, part of purposely living is to have a vision and design of life that one is purposely pursuing.

I know, nothing is guaranteed in life. And, the vision or design may be totally off the mark. After all, my life is not totally in my control.

For all I know, my Maker may have a totally different design for me. I may have to check out tomorrow or day after from this life. And then again, may be my Maker is waiting for my designs to figure out how to make that happen. But since I have not heard from my Maker either way, I might as well make plans that both of us could follow.

Is it even possible to envision personal life 30 years into the future? In the past thirty years, I have done this only in 4-year chunks and even that with not much precision.

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen open their book Great by Choice with a thesis:

You cannot predict the future. But you can create it.

They further elaborate this thesis as follows:

“Think back to 15 years ago, and consider what’s happened since, the destabilizing events – in the world, in your country, in the markets, in your work, in your life – that defied all expectations. We can be astonished, confounded, shocked, stunned, delighted, or terrified, but rarely prescient. None of us can predict with uncertainty the twists and turns our lives will take. Life is uncertain, the future unknown. This is neither good nor bad. It just is, like gravity. Yet the task remains: how to master our own fate, even so.”

And, then the rest of the book backs up that claim with various examples of businesses and people who prove his thesis.

That sounds like an interesting approach to life.

This is about as far as I have gone until today in thinking of my 90th birthday and towards a vision, design or plan for purposely living the next six decades.

Any thoughts?

I would like to believe that these are NOT simply musings of a mid-life crisis. That would be too simplistic a rationalization to dismiss these questions with.

I would love to hear how you approach life.