Stepping back to our past’s future
So, we’re all here for something, right? Quizzically gazing, looking for some sign that points us in a direction more sure, more meaningful, more rewarding. Like running across Max von Sydow’s character, Antonius Block, on the way to the coffee truck, broken and morally disjointed, and just feeling better because someone real feels just like us.
He’s not a motivational speaker and he’s not the opposite, he’s in a de-tangled mode, feeling unimbedded in the world, but at the same time more real than the zealously focused and sure.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. — Yeats, The Second Coming
Or, perhaps in the fluctuating trans-temporal experience of a galactic hitchhiker, or the place where pain and loss find healing at a coffee shop right just beyond the end of the view of the James Webb telescope.. yes, in those speculative zones, it might be ok just to daydream. In fact, it might be essential to do so.
That’s why today I’m proposing a little step back into the future. A little daily exercise where we try to remember the future we were thinking back when daydreaming was endless and vital (maybe even more so now) — gently so, forgivingly so, happily so.
For example, go back to when you were thirteen. Yeah, when you were sweet 13, what were you imagining about your future? Did you want to travel the world and get paid for it? Hmm.. there are people who do that. Did you want to work for NASA and join a team of people who’ll scream when a probe lands on Europa? Yes, did you want to join the dreamers actually paid to dream? Or, perhaps being a writer embedded in a nurturing little room with a little muted hustle bustle just beyond the window of your workroom — a broken mug, discarded cracked lego pieces, a Tonka truck with asphalt and pebbles from the road in front of your old home — objects full of delicious un-functionality?
(Am I dreaming right now like you are?)
And, when you were 7, what were you dreaming of then? What were your immediate unmitigated visionary thrills?
Do you remember being attuned to your environment, often overwhelmingly so? Places with qualities that were hard to pin down — diffuse ambient moods and meaning — dreamlike and melancholic.
I am still always fixed in this kind of Dr. Who telephone box transportational zone. Does this hold a key for some kind of salvation for us from vapid busyness — or are we destined to be lost in a Solaris-like ocean of memories and our memories’ future?
So (back to so), just a little exercise for the day and a conjecture and wish.
Let me know how this goes for you
