It is not what we predict but how we inflict our past upon our future that matters.
Our obsessive grip on concrete facts and certainty constrains and blinds us from what destiny has in store. We are not overcome by the horrors and hopes we expect. It's the punch we don't see coming is the one that takes us down; the unexpected gifts and surprises give us the most joy. Our ability to reach a goal that we never dreamt possible and do things we never thought we could defines the boundaries of our joy and life.
Rational choice is a succor, an instant gratification that quietly rots a deep cavity into our imagination. Our friends say what we need to see. Our enemy is the one within, the soft voice that hides us from the joys of inconsistency, looking clumsy, confusion, ambiguity, relishing not knowing or being liked. The rest is vanity unleashed. When we serve the past blindly we inflict the past upon the future.
Our future flowers from the unknown present moment. Sometimes we need to slow down to speed up. Stand still to know where we need to be.
If we tie the choke hold of certainty around the throat of our creativity we should be prepared to swallow the infliction of never knowing surprise.
All along dormant needs sit paitently, waiting for a little ray of light to shine through.
Our latent knowledge suffers the indignity we would not reserve for our greatest enemies.
As long as our sense of identity is tethered to a past that is defined by where we are now rather than where we have truly been how can we claim to know where we will be?
Our practial wisdom is consumed in the grind of the daily noise of senseles habits. We are surrounded by pepole who can see all in us that we cannot and we choose not to ask and they choose not to intrude on our lonely plight for fear that we might disrupt theirs.
And yet a seven year old who does not speak through filters of what 'should be' because they have the pleasure of not knowing any better or a seventy year old whose filters have been stripped away because she has realised what a terrible burden self deception is, they will introduce us to the strangeness that is the stuff of life.
Predicting the future is a fruitless activity, it ought to be outlawed with all the other drugs that society spurns. If we pay attention to not knowing, we can sense the fresh morning air and risk experiencing an untold future, enriched with surprise.
"So that in venturing ill we leave to be
The things we are for that which we expect;
And this ambitius foul infirmity,
In having much, torments us with defect
Of that we have: so then we do neglect
The thing we have; and all for want of wit,
Make something nothing by augmenting it"
The Rape of Lucrece (211)
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