9/25/2022 06:39

A Way Into the Future Past

In actual reality I am moving from one old house to a different old house. I may be condemned to live all my life in houses of about the same age as myself, except for a few years of living in even older houses, but that rule does not preclude subjecting myself to the misery of changing which same age house I live in.

Whatever possessed me to undertake such emotional self-flagellation? One consideration was that I do not want to end up as one of those old people who find they have to move but have forgotten how to do it. At this moment I feel confident that I will never forget the process of moving. The hardships. The confusion. The uncertainty. The expense. The doubts that I should ever have committed myself to a vague hope of future benefit when I had a full suite of perfectly stable annoyances already in hand.

I have started imagining how life in the new house will be when it is postpackaged for the convenience of my recollection, when all the doubts about what might happen in the future present will perforce be resolved by the facts of what will have really happened in the future past, when some revised form of actual reality will seem to form the teleological endpoint of all the poor decisions made in the current present.

One likes to think life would flow more smoothly if one had better control of the moments into which one is constantly plunging but a sober consideration raises doubts about one's capacity for managing the ongoing vicissitudes of the *actual reality game*. Life prepackaged for my convenience is probably a myth.

I will soon have even less control of events in the future past than I now have over events of the current future. In compensation I will have the advantage of a greater confidence about how those events will progress.

My desire is to combine the certainties of hindsight with the open possibilities of foresight. My assumption (which is fully untested) is that with a vision extending both fore and aft a person is never blindsided. Even as I write that down I notice a failure to mention side vision in a statement about side vision.

I think of the horse which my father and I were advised to approach thoughtfully because he was blind in one eye. Come up on his sighted side, we were told, and not his blind side. Else he is likely to shy or kick out.


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