When the Future talks to you

How fast can time pass? I mean we are already in the second quarter of the year, just like that! My super awesome niece, Claire, is just about five months in this twisted world, and she's so grown. I think the enthusiasm of all these new experiences is really psyching her up. Can you imagine, every single thing that's happening in your life is new? Not routine......awesome, right?

But for you the only sure thing I fathom is that by now you’ve broken most of your year’s resolutions or as you might as well, want to put it; you’ve ‘amended’ them a couple of times to ‘suit situations’.

You are probably realizing that some of them were unrealistic, or needed some better timelines. Better still, if you are the kind (I included) who live life as a free-fall of events banking on your flexibility, you might be thinking you ought to have had a few resolutions. So it’s quite some good time to do an audit of how productive you’ve been this year.

Hold that thought. And consider this;

What if you had a glimpse of the future? For just a few minutes you see yourself six months, one year, or say five years from now. Fancy that?

The future is agreeably uncertain for all of us and as such you might find yourself successful, you got

that dream job, your own company and a beautiful family but it’s also possible to find yourself miserable, jobless, divorced, broke or even in jail or dead!

That kind of information would surely be invaluable to your present life. Especially if you are aware that your future is a dark one you would make all efforts to change the possible causes of your failure and just maybe change it (since there’s no such thing as what people call, destiny). If it is indeed good and rosy then you’d probably want to accelerate things although some would just sit back, relax and wait for things to happen. For instance if you realized that you’ll die in the next five years (in your flash-forward you read your obituary) you’d definitely make drastic changes to your long term goals and a host of many other things top among them ways of avoiding death.

The dashboard console of the time-travel
vehicle in Back to The Future movie

I know this all sounds wishful thinking and a result of too much time-machine movies like my personal favorite Back to the Future where this nerd scientist invents time-travel and he is able to manipulate events across the two time divides; future and past. In a hilarious twist of events the scientist kid friend travels into the past and his alcoholic mother falls for him altering his future. If his parents don’t meet then he has no future. Something called the Grandfather Paradox!

But the more thought-provoking one is FlashBack where the whole world falls unconscious for two minutes and each person has a vision of himself six months into the future. The anarchy that follows makes you realize how uncertainty is quite a gift!

I will agree with you if you think am sounding delusional and having deliberate affront to common sense, but interestingly physicists have actually made significant milestones in developing the time-machine that one Ronald Mallet, Professor at the University of Connecticut predicts that humans might have the means to travel in time by the end of this century!  (Don’t take my word for it, click on the blue links learn more).

Now go back in time (pun very deliberate) and rewound that thought you were to hold. If you were to go back to New Year’s Eve am sure you would have made some very concrete resolutions. And am positive there are many other junctures in your life that you wish you had acted wiser, or decisively.

Well, that’s just about it. In the present world as it is, the future is the most realistic thing that we can think of changing (if you don’t believe in destiny) or more accurately look-forward-to influence. It is undeniably unnerving, terribly worrying and in essence the very reason why we exist; work, love, go to war and even pray.

I remember the very first break-up I had. I hear they say there is no shame in admitting you were dumped, but naah, I won’t say. It was some terrible infatuation that we had drowned into and by the time she was being given CPR on the shore I was still fighting lilies and kissing bedrock. If somebody had told me that I would be this happy at that time I would never have understood. If I had known for real that it would be insignificant in the near future I probably would have missed the whole process of reinventing myself.

But the predicament am facing today dwarfs the relationship trifle that I was grappling with at that time. In exactly four weeks from now I will no longer be a student. While that might be something to celebrate, for me it means that exactly one month later I will be on my own. My very practical dad had casually said to me when I entered college that this was the farthest he would hold my hands, he alluded to the fact that his own parents had barely seen him though high school, that he had worked his way through college to employment on his own; this was a favour. I must have been too enthusiastic about college at that time to realize how blunt he was at the time.

On January as I left for school, he was quick to confirm if this was my last semester, apparently he never gets it right. Before reiterating his weaning-out agenda he was kind enough to ask “What exactly is that course you’re pursuing about?” I mumbled a few things and left. Now it’s gradually dawning on me, how I wish these scientists can fast track this time-travel project!

Am looking at a profession where competition is inordinately high with an ever appalling increase of non-professionals. Comedians rather and all manner of mediocre fellas thriving at the very core. Am sure some of my ‘advisers’ who were adamant I pursue education (because it’s safe) even before I completed secondary school are watching me in cynicism.

Securing an internship position alone (with no pay) in a serious media house is a real nightmare. A friend of mine a month ago had to furiously delete and blacklist the number of a former acquaintance who he had been counted on all along to ‘connect’ him for an internship position at a leading paper only to be asked to part with a whooping 50k!

Am almost certain that am not the only person who’s wary of the immediate future, a job interview that’s coming up, maybe your just about to become a dad, you’ve invested some bounty in the stock exchange, your university hasn’t accredited your course or even the simple issue of being caught up in the rain and your running short of fare.

Fear

Am afraid of the future…
I don’t know what will happen tomorrow…
I am afraid to lose the things that I have or fail to get the things that I want…

We might not be saying these phrases directly but we sometimes feel every thought in these words creeping up on us, even at times when we appear most confident. How many times have you worried about the future or felt Afraid of it?

David Cain, a lifestyle blogger in article for thoughtcatalog.com says that if you look at almost any fear, ‘‘it’s always a specific moment you are feeling’’. A moment with awful feelings in it – awkwardness, pain, shame, guilt, horror, shame, angst. He opines that life unfolds only in moments and as such our fear of the unpredictable future is based on fear of moments that you believe will force you to experience feelings that you really don’t want to experience.

Basically, whatever drives us are two things; the appeal of feelings we want to experience like love and the fear of feelings we don’t want to experience, like failure. This means that whatever we fear is actually something that we have already experienced, we wouldn’t fear it if we hadn’t.

As such David staunchly cautions against dismissing entire categories of events and decisions from our lives just because they have the potential of evoking moments with acute feelings that we’d rather not experience again. For example giving up on marriage because you were hurt in one relationship.

Since it’s not possible (yet) to travel back in time or into the future it’s imperative that we learn to conquer fear of the unknown. One fact that should get you started on this is that, no matter what unnerving or terrifying scenario you are picturing in your mind, this is not the way that it will actually go down.

For instance that phone call you have been postponing, you’re thinking the interview won’t go well or your requests won’t be proved; you realize that when you finally make the call it definitely turns out a bit different from the horrors you had imagined.

 The real bad stuff isn't going to be something you had the foresight to worry about anyway.

“The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.” – Mary Schmich

So relax, it’s never that serious.