Sixty seven million years ago and for all of 160 million years before it, the dinosaurs ruled the entire planet and had much to look forward to. Then, in a flash, literally, an asteroid struck what is now the Yucatan peninsula. Just a day before that the dinosaurs had at least another 67 million years - from then to the present era - to look forward to. That one event forever changed everything. Today, dinosaurs can sometimes only be associated with the cliché to describe a long gone usefulness of anything past its prime.
Familiar? Oh, yes. An up and coming politician, or a newly minted multimillionaire, a rising executive on the way up the corporate totem pole, or one charismatic religious leader, or many a personality at the pinnacle of achievement, or anything so popular and sought after, then an asteroid struck, figuratively speaking. A sex scandal, a corrupt business strategy unraveled, a new invention that rendered one gizmo past its utility, etc. and everything ended. An asteroid struck!
The future, untouched and yet to become the present, is pristine territory, untarnished, unblemished, is ineluctably all that we and ever will have. Everybody willing to ponder it, has it. The future is the home of hope, the unopened box of dreams, the repository of our wishes, the clean parchment upon which we could write what will have come out of all our aspirations, our five year plan, or ten or twenty, or what little time we think we have left, it is also the landscape upon which our retirement shall be painted of many vivid colors, where we are free to move around or do whatever we want to do. That is until it becomes now, today, and soon only to be patches of our memory.
That might seem a fatalistic view if one focuses only on the inevitable and not what paves the path upon which we all must travel. We should not set our eyes only on what awaits us in the final destination because that is a mere point, an instance no more important nor dreadful than all the points along the way and byways we call life.
There is much to rejoice over what is yet to come. Every slice of what seems like a hastened moment of the present is to be enjoyed, the pages of moments past merely a reference for lessons learned and recollections of joyful experiences, an unwritten journal of how we lived and how well we've affected others with whom we shared our lives.
Much too often we are told that our lives are like a roll of film, each frame a moment. If it were so, it means that we can roll everything backwards! But no, because it is impossible to go back in time, books and B-movies not withstanding. There is no do over and there is no going backwards, mulligans are prohibited.
My view of the passage of time is this. I imagine each slice of reality a very thin membrane, each one from an infinite number of playing cards standing upright like dominoes. A moment passes and one card membrane falls forward to topple the next one, like in dominoes. Each fallen membrane, the past second or moment, is irretrievably gone, a memory and never to stand upright again. There is an infinite number of fallen cards behind - one event at a time, collated to make up a history. In front, an array of infinite number of strings of upright membrane-cards, spread out like a spider web of infinite strands, each a probability of what is yet to come. The future landscape is exactly that - arrays of separate rows of upright membranes that make up the future - filled with all sorts of possibilities, sets of probabilities. As one card topples over, only one of the probabilities, and only one, may occur, to collapse into a single real event. Not one moment too soon, the "present event" becomes a moment ago - never to be retrieved, only remembered.
It is from that definition that I say, "The future is all that we have". But that doesn't mean it is a free lunch. That future will be shaped by events caused to occur for each of us, either by our own doing or by others or by what happens to be outside of our control.
Again, fatalistic? No, because it is often said, and I believe it, that it is not so much what just happened but how well we react to any event that comes our way. It could be a sweet flowing stream of joyous occasions or a thundering herd of problems or bad news barreling down our path. Which ever it is, we are tested at how well we take happy moments or how well we deal with adversity.
Where ever we are at this point in our lives until we get to our final destination, there are still an infinite number of cards yet to be dealt and dealt with.
Forget re-living the past, revising it or in any way alter parts of it to comfort or assuage ourselves because those fallen pieces are best left alone. Remember them, to learn from their passage or relish the memory of joyous times but never re-living them. The pieces had fallen. Focus on the infinite number of upright cards in front of us. It will serve as well to train our thoughts and actions at which card we prefer to fall next. In a way, that is how we control what fallen cards we leave behind.
But what if we are left without a choice but forced to take the one and only option in front of us, you ask. Yes, that could happen. Of course, there is the question of how did one get to be caught in such a predicament, in the first place? Often, by stern self-examination done in earnest, one finds that he or she had total control of what future cards he or she allowed to fall. The good news is that, more readily than one may expect, the upright cards in front of us, are still more than enough to get us back on the right array of potential alternatives. That is because only the future still has the upright cards of hope or kindling to start the fiery wishes or aspirations long forgotten or set aside.
When each of our stories is told, it will always be about what future cards we picked and allowed to fall forward in time. And ..
"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story."
-Frank Herbert
"Our story may have any number of endings but its start is a singular choice we make today."
-Faisal Khosa
Future cards are all we have; choose wisely.
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