whatever will be, will be.

Whatever Will Be.

When I was just a little boy, I believed my father knew everything.

He could hoist me onto his shoulders and make the world seem smaller, safer. He could mend a broken toy with his rough, work-worn hands. And when I asked him the questions that burned inside me, he answered with a gentleness that carried more weight than certainty ever could.

One evening beneath a star-thick sky, I asked, “Father, what will I be? Will I be handsome? Will I be rich?”

He looked at me for a long moment, then smiled in a way that was both amused and sad.

“Whatever will be, will be. The future is not ours to see.”

At the time, I hated that answer. I wanted a map, a guarantee. But those words followed me for the rest of my life, as though they’d been stitched into my skin.

---

I grew up.

My hands grew calloused like his. My life didn’t follow the paths I thought it would. I was not rich, not by any measure the world cared about. I wasn’t handsome in the way heroes are drawn.

But I learned to savor what I had: bread still warm from the oven, the crackle of fire in winter, the hand of someone who chose to stay.

And when loneliness pressed against me, when I begged the world for clarity, my father’s refrain came back like a half-remembered melody:

Whatever will be, will be.

---

I met Anna on a day I hadn’t planned for. She wasn’t the future I had imagined for myself—she was better.

She laughed easily, even when life was cruel. She believed in me with a faith I could never quite return in myself. Together we built a home.

One day, children’s voices filled it.

My daughter, not yet six, tugged at my sleeve. “Papa, what will I be when I grow up? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?”

The echo of my boyhood split my chest wide. I wanted to promise her everything—safety, beauty, joy untouched by sorrow. But as I looked into her bright, questioning eyes, my father’s words rose again.

I smoothed her hair and whispered:

“Whatever will be, will be. The future is not ours to see.”

She frowned, unsatisfied. Just as I once had been.

---

Time moved quickly after that.

Children grow not in seasons but in leaps—first tooth, first day of school, first heartbreak. Each milestone cut me with pride and softened me with fear.

“Will I be successful?”
“Will I fall in love?”
“Will I make you proud?”

They asked, again and again.

And again, I gave them the only truth I had. Whatever will be, will be. Not a surrender, but a trust—that they would walk forward into whatever awaited them, and that I would stand behind them, always.

---

When my father grew old, I sat beside his bed. His hands were thinner now. His voice, fainter.

“Do you remember,” I asked him, “what you used to say to me?”

A flicker of a smile touched his lips. “Whatever will be, will be.”

And I realized, sitting there, that it was not a phrase at all but an inheritance. A gift passed down not through promises, but through faith in the unknown.

---

Now my hair has silvered. My children have children of their own.

They run to me with the same bright eyes, the same questions:

“What will I be?”
“Will I be rich? Will I be beautiful?”

And I tell them tenderly what was once told to me, what has carried me through joy and heartbreak alike:

“Whatever will be, will be. The future is not ours to see.”

---

Life is not a straight road, but a winding one.

Some dreams fade. Others bloom in their place. Some days are bitter. Others, impossibly sweet.

And in the end, it was never about being rich, or handsome, or certain.

It was about walking forward despite not knowing what lay ahead—and discovering that love, and family, and memory itself were enough.

---

On quiet evenings, I watch my grandchildren chase each other beneath the same kind of sky I once gazed upon with my father.

The stars burn above us.

I smile, and I whisper into the night, as though my father still stands beside me:

“Que será, será. Whatever will be, will be.”

---