Fear not for the future, weep not for the past. --Percy Bysshe ShelleyI think that I have figured out something that has been bothering the grey matter that lies between my ears. I will try now to synthesize it coherently, which will not be easy. It is how to predict what lies ahead--our future. I don't want to predict it, just anticipate it, try to somehow prepare myself gently for what is laid out before me.
I have read some of the thinkers of the world, not overly in-depth or anything like it. Some psychologists, philosophers and some sociologists, seeking to come to some conclusions on living. Most of what has been written regarding living tends to view what has happened in the past is the cause of the way we function as we do now. Freud blamed it on love or lack-of-love by and for our moms. Jung on our dreams and the concepts of paired opposites...good/bad, love/hate, past/future. Nietzsche on everything and nothing at the same time, the tragedy as an affirmation of life as it eternally reoccurs.
But I digress.
To know our future is to take all of the surprise out of living. I discovered during a long road trip across Michigan's upper peninsula this fall, that all that I saw, the whole entire trip, was the past. What I saw, the trees, the landscape, the waves on the lake along the roadside was not at those moments even real. I was zooming past the future, time traveling backwards. By the time it took the mind to gather and process those images, the were already over. In the past. Like viewing the stars. Radiated light thrown from millions of light years away, from suns of distant solar systems that may already have gone cold. They may not even cast forth light now. What we see is the visual messages that are thrown out of the past. We only believe it is now because our mind is tricking us to see it that way. Even the words I type, by the time I look at them, are part of the great vanishing everything.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said, "Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward. But how to understand, to see the "what" that may lie ahead? The future must be, behind me instead. It must be creeping up on me over my shoulder, ducking constantly away from the edges of my peripheral vision. So what is left is but the need to try and comprehend the future by what I can see in the past. I shall never catch it, the future, but I will surely continue to chase my desire to understand it.
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2 comments:
A very introspective and philosophical post, as always! Living in this very moment--moment by moment--seems the only way to live peacefully and sanely.
I remain careful with my living in the moment and try to enjoy it for what I hope to see, for as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra said, “Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
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