So far as human minds can fathom, there is no such thing as the future.
Sure, there are things in futurity. We have our calendars, our fixed dates and expectations of what will come to pass. But the future remains unattainable, always turning into now and then sliding--consumed--into the past.
I'm hardly the first person to make this consideration. Indeed, in some ways, contemplating time is one of the core purposes of philosophy. It's also beyond philosophy and into the scientific, with all sorts of possibilities (like the minuscule Planck instant) embedded within it. People much smarter than I have burrowed into this topic and tried to share their understanding. But since my feeble brain can't necessarily follow their paths, I'll wander around in my own version of what I can comprehend.
And that's this: The entirety of a human's experience is an omnipresent now that is somehow different than then but not entirely independent of to come. That is, we live on the bleeding edge of time (probably), eating into the future with the same sort of confidence of continuation as inhalations of air--assuming, for our practical purposes, that there's infinite available to us.
Mortality tends to redirect our sense of time--which science would call relative elsewhere, but is essentially uniform on Earth--into thinking of future happiness and family, future joys and expectations. The dread of death, even when enfolded into faith, provides a bookend of experience. As Shakespeare says, "...our little life/Is rounded with a sleep." We slept before we came; we sleep through much of the now; we'll sleep again, regardless of "what dreams may come." The living mark the time in the arbitrary ways of mankind, living forward as time cycles about us, swinging around our yellow sun, repeating the moments and memories, the times and traditions of all the other times we've swooped along our orbit.
We lament wasted time. We squander our time. We savor, invest, pay for, and otherwise pretend our time is valuable. But all we have is time. All that's left is time. And when we shuffle off this mortal coil, it will be into another time.
As a person of middling faith, the possibility of eternity lying before me is intimidating and not at all reassuring. That there is a life to come--one free of the vicissitudes and violence of now--oscillates between reassuring and terrifying. On the one hand, those most precious will be only temporarily lost to me. The pleasures of association that I appreciate now have a promise of resumption. But what to do to fill the time. How else can time be experienced? If eternity is to be comprehended, time would have to be perceived in two dimensions--and since I'm only able to perceive it in one, I can't really conceive of what eternity could be. Yet it's a promise that I'm to rely upon.
I suppose the answer will come...
....in time.
Sure, there are things in futurity. We have our calendars, our fixed dates and expectations of what will come to pass. But the future remains unattainable, always turning into now and then sliding--consumed--into the past.
I'm hardly the first person to make this consideration. Indeed, in some ways, contemplating time is one of the core purposes of philosophy. It's also beyond philosophy and into the scientific, with all sorts of possibilities (like the minuscule Planck instant) embedded within it. People much smarter than I have burrowed into this topic and tried to share their understanding. But since my feeble brain can't necessarily follow their paths, I'll wander around in my own version of what I can comprehend.
And that's this: The entirety of a human's experience is an omnipresent now that is somehow different than then but not entirely independent of to come. That is, we live on the bleeding edge of time (probably), eating into the future with the same sort of confidence of continuation as inhalations of air--assuming, for our practical purposes, that there's infinite available to us.
Mortality tends to redirect our sense of time--which science would call relative elsewhere, but is essentially uniform on Earth--into thinking of future happiness and family, future joys and expectations. The dread of death, even when enfolded into faith, provides a bookend of experience. As Shakespeare says, "...our little life/Is rounded with a sleep." We slept before we came; we sleep through much of the now; we'll sleep again, regardless of "what dreams may come." The living mark the time in the arbitrary ways of mankind, living forward as time cycles about us, swinging around our yellow sun, repeating the moments and memories, the times and traditions of all the other times we've swooped along our orbit.
We lament wasted time. We squander our time. We savor, invest, pay for, and otherwise pretend our time is valuable. But all we have is time. All that's left is time. And when we shuffle off this mortal coil, it will be into another time.
As a person of middling faith, the possibility of eternity lying before me is intimidating and not at all reassuring. That there is a life to come--one free of the vicissitudes and violence of now--oscillates between reassuring and terrifying. On the one hand, those most precious will be only temporarily lost to me. The pleasures of association that I appreciate now have a promise of resumption. But what to do to fill the time. How else can time be experienced? If eternity is to be comprehended, time would have to be perceived in two dimensions--and since I'm only able to perceive it in one, I can't really conceive of what eternity could be. Yet it's a promise that I'm to rely upon.
I suppose the answer will come...
....in time.