Two weeks ago, I wrote three posts about approaches to past, present, and future from a somewhat abstract perspective, philosophizing (blathering?) about what each can mean spiritually. This is the third of three posts that take a different approach to past, present, and future, that try to explain how each is lived—which is must trickier with the future, you know?  

“Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.”  

Thus John Fowles begins Daniel Martin, thereby consigning me (consarn it) to apparent wretchedness, for farsighted I am only with those eyes in the back of my head: for what lies ahead, I am Polyphemus—initially condemned by single eye and lack of parallax sight to misperceive the depth of what’s to come and ultimately left blind and groping uncertainly. 

When philosophizing about the future, I proposed that it was possible to live in the present while working toward a future goal, that one could marry present-mindfulness with future-mindedness when one first chooses a long-term goal that perfectly reflects, or expresses, one’s character and values and then focuses mindfully on each intermediate step even while keeping one’s eye on the prize. 

This rosy picture ignored several confounding potentialities, of course, such as the power of random disasters, natural or human, global or personal, to gang upon us, rendering the best laid schemes awfully agley, or the queasy feeling of drift that one experiences when floating aimlessly upon a sea of troubles. 

For you see (dirty little secret), working toward goals has only rarely been the course of my life, and not for a long, long time. My goals have generally been medium-term (reach college, graduate college, marry, raise children, essay freelancing), with no long-range narrative preordained. If my life has a story arc, it’s shaped by the editor, not the author. 

This approach to life has an advantage, of course, as it opens one to experience: possibilities are not rejected because they don’t fit into the master plot line. With no paradigm at work, it’s easy to turn on a dime. On the other hand, everything is Terra (or Mare) Incognita. 

Some people seem downright Promethean about the future, able to envision the Shape of Things to Come and then model the Play-Doh of their lives (and sometimes manipulate others’ modeling compound) to make it so. Some, too, have flashes of insight into the future, picturing some condition to come that convinces them of its inevitability through its clarity and leaves them with a peaceful certainty. Others of us shamble along as Epimetheus, Monday morning quarterbacks of life, brilliant in identifying the bad play calls or the poor execution of the last game but unable to find the right lasix practitioner to sharpen our forward view, incapable of devising a winning plan for the next game.  

To me, the future is an even more puzzling (frightening?) “undiscovered country” than death, for death is final, leav ing no questions (unless we do reincarnate, which we won’t know until we do so): “The End,” roll the credits, clear the theater please. The future, though, we expect to live, to be a part of, to experience. Yet it is like the looming blank of unexplored land to the cartographer, the unrevealing black areas of unscouted land in a video game, areas that could hold resources or might be full of powerful enemies but, until we send our units into them, stare back at us, opaque, impenetrable (contemptuous?). 

Or is it? Perhaps the future is understandable after all. Perhaps the future is a book written in a language we cannot read, something seemingly unintelligible but which gradually becomes clear to us, present moment by present moment. (If reincarnation happens, that book is a palimpsest.) Perhaps the Rosetta Stone we use to translate the unintelligible future is this: just as we absorb and carry the past with us, we are little Pac-men and Pac-women, gobbling the future one energy bit at a time. The future, then, is part of us too, all our pasts naught but former futures, reduced, like all the former Indras that Joseph Campbell told us about, from terrible power and glory to mere ant-ness. But if the future is a book, is our fate engraved and unchanged?

I prefer to think of life as one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels written for young adults in the ‘80s. We have an eventual fate, yes. But how that fatal moment plays out, how we get there, and what we do on the way is up to us. At various decision points, we choose, and jump into another chapter, which might be frying pan or might be fire, or, if we’re really fortunate, offers us a welcome frying pan sitting atop a fire.  

While the assumption of free will is reassuring—no one likes to be a puppet—that still leaves an unsettling question: “Where am I going?” Towards the end of Arturo Peréz-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, protagonist Lucas Corso contrasts fiction to life: “In the real world, many things happen by chance, but in fiction nearly everything is logical.” Corso’s conclusion is ironic, of course, as several assumption he makes about the “real” world in which he lives (actually fictional), which he believes to be based on the fictional world of The Three Musketeers, are completely wrong. His conclusions are logical, but  he’s not part of a game with rules but a victim of chance. And if we are to believe narrator Boris Balkan (the name underscoring the complicated lines of all these interweaving ironies), he as “reader” of the text of the events in which he is part,  “overlays the text with his own perverse view.” For, Balkan continues, “A reader is the total of all he’s read, in addition to all the films and television he’s seen. To the information supplied by the author he’ll always add his own.” 

In other words, as we perceive the world—or the future—we create the world, but the world we create is an unreal one—not the one the author wrote. How, then, do we clean the tarnish of our misperceptions off the Grail of reality so that we see it clearly?  

Which brings us back to the vision thing—how do we gain whole sight into the future? And once again, the only thing clear to me is why the future is so frustrating. We can experience the present with mindful attention. We can relive past experiences by biting into the right pastry. How do we experience the future before we reach it? I suppose one answer is that we are doing it all the time but don’t know it—until we have that sense of déjà vu that tells us it already happened. 

Beyond that, I have no answers to this one. I’m just searching, in my blind and groping way.  

Perhaps the answer is to be like Big Maple, who, after all, has no eyes, but who still sends roots burrowing into the ground to find moisture and nourishment, who reaches branches to the sky, groping for sunlight, finding sustenance by being in, and totally dependent upon, the world of Form in which it lives, carrying memories of the past in the width of its rings and the marks on its bark, content with stretching in many directions and with providing sustenance and sanctuary to other creatures, but not fretting about the un-Formed future, which, of course, plants it firmly in the present.  

Words © 2011 AtHome Pilgrim.

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