We are entertained by our futures because we love to consider how it would feel to have that thing, experience that condition, love that person, build that ediface, or discover that treasure.
mysterious force that we all sense but rarely explore in depth. Science has pointed out to us that the atoms in our bodies, and indeed the entire cosmos, came from the stellar birthplace of billions of stars.
The future engages our emotional selves in a way that few things do for many of us in the present. Our present selves may be routine bound, discouraged, and worn out. Our present selves may have lost sight of what inspires us and become gray shadows in the glorious world when once we were lit up by the flames of our creativity and optimism. The future is a movie ticket to that inspired source within that trusts in the goodness of things. The future is about having faith in the face of the unknown to come. From the standpoint of the present, our future dreams will always be larger than life, but that largeness occurs only in our imaginations, not in life itself.
Religion adds the qualities of awareness and moral action to this act of creation and humanizes it by assigning it to a creator. Is it any wonder that we experience our future as a sort of brightly shining reexperience of our stellar birth? And what has all that to do with resolving to give up apples? Simply this: the present, not the past or the future, is where our life takes place. To the extent that we are conscious of our resolutions in the present moment, we are able to affect real changes in our lives. Dwelling in the past is settling for a limited version of the now, and anticipating the future is imagining our own perfectability. Learn from the past, energize your creative imagination from the future, but always live in the present. Your New Year’s resolutions will be firmly anchored in your life if you do so, but do it NOW!
Life itself is always present, eternally and infinitely so. Life is the essential stuff of existence in our universe, and who’s to say whether the very stars themselves are not alive with some
Tim Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He is currently busy working on several writing and editing projects. Please visit Thompson InkWorks for more info.
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