Future

The here and now is all we have, and if we play it right it's all we'll need.

Ann Richards
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Hello George
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"The past id prologue" Shakespeare wrote, it was made up of a whole string of theres and thens,and there isn't much we con do with it but let the present and the future make whatever needed changes there are in it and put the rest in the dust bin.

"The future lies ahead" as the silly saying goes. We can't predict what's going to happen, people say. Who's going to win the election? Which horse is going to win the race? What are tomorrow's winning lottery numbers? If we knew the answer we would not be rich because everyone else would know also and they would close the lottery down. Personally I like Yogi Berra's view "The future ain't what it used to be."

But what about my future and yours? The fact is we have the future right in our hands, right now. Just as the past was made up of theres and thens, the future is made up of heres and nows. Everything we do today is defining the future for us. We are creating the future at this moment. And that's why the present, the here and now, is the only real time there is.

Years ago I saw a film, maybe you saw it, about a man who bought a strange newspaper from a particular news vendor which printed the news for the following day. The man was delighted since he had foreknowledge of everything that was going to happen. Until one day he read in the paper his own obituary. He panicked, and tried everything to stay alive. But it turned out that another man picked his pocket and stole his wallet and then was struck dead in the street by an accident. When the police repotted it to the news they identified the dead man from the name in the wallet And thus the wrong name was printed in the obit. He decided to stop buying that paper.

The moral of the story is to stop believing the dire predictions the world holds out in one form or another as a certain forthcoming event. There's a word I like. It's prolepsis. It means stating something that may happen in the future as if it has already happened. For example, whoever wins the Republican Party nomination will be introduced to the convention as "The next president of the United States." If he wins the election then it was a true statement. If he loses to the current Present it could be true 4 years later. In any case it is a proleptic statement, and the future is not made of predictions. It's made of the here and now.

I hold my future in my hand right now as a bright guiding star which tells me that what I think at this moment will be reflected in the next here and now, and so on through the infinite string of the present, which is the only real time..

Dana Bate - The Vagabond
Never Give Up
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