The Future Is More Than What You Fear
By H.R. Zimmerer
You can think carefully about tomorrow and still leave it unfinished. You can prepare for a difficulty without deciding that difficulty is the only thing waiting for you. There is a difference between carrying a plan and carrying a verdict, and it can be easy to slip from one into the other without noticing. At some point, the thing you were trying to be ready for begins to stand for the whole of what comes next.
The unwelcome possibility often has plenty of detail. You can hear the conversation, imagine the expression on someone’s face, work out what you would do afterwards. Meanwhile, the good possibility may have no shape at all. You have not met the person who might become important to you. You do not know which place you will want to visit again. An ordinary afternoon that could make you happy has not yet supplied a single detail for you to picture.
That makes the comparison uneven. You are looking at a difficulty you have already furnished with your imagination and placing it beside an empty space. Of course the difficulty seems more present. But a vivid picture is still a picture. It cannot account for everything that may enter a life. The fact that you cannot yet describe a welcome surprise does not require you to exclude one.
Think of something you now love that you once knew nothing about. A book, perhaps, or a song whose opening notes you would recognise anywhere. Before it became familiar, it existed without a place in your day. You could not have missed it because you had not met it. Then an encounter changed that. There may be no way to predict the next encounter, but you have already lived through the arrival of things you could not have anticipated in detail.
I would not ask you to use that thought to make a flattering explanation of everything you have endured. Some experiences remain painful, unfair or senseless even after good things have happened elsewhere in your life. You do not have to rename them before you are allowed to hope. A future can contain something welcome without proving that every difficult thing was secretly arranged for your benefit.
What interests me is the room you leave in your decisions. If you have already settled that nothing will be different, you may decline the invitation before you know who will be there. You may leave the work untouched because you cannot see where it will lead. You may treat an unfamiliar kindness as a mistake. Allowing a little possibility can be very practical: you ask the question, try the afternoon, or give the conversation enough time to become something other than the one you expected.
None of this obliges you to feel cheerful on command. You can be tired and still answer an invitation. You can have doubts and still begin a page. Good things do not need you to provide a flawless mood before you can notice or participate in them. There is relief in not making yourself responsible for manufacturing the entire atmosphere of your future.
Perhaps the good you meet will be quiet. A task becomes work you enjoy. An acquaintance grows familiar enough for a joke to become yours. You spend a Tuesday in a way you would not have thought to ask for, and remember it later with affection. These possibilities need not be grand to deserve a place beside the more difficult things you can imagine. A life is altered by its ordinary pleasures as well as by its largest events.
You do not need to settle the whole question tonight. You can leave a space in your account of what comes next. A friendship could begin there. You could learn something that makes a familiar place look different. You could have a day you are glad to remember. For now, it is enough not to close the future against those possibilities before it has had a chance to arrive.
Prose reflection
You can take the future seriously without imagining it only in the shape of what you fear. There may be a friendship in it you have not begun, a place you will want to return to, a version of an ordinary Tuesday that you will remember with affection.
You cannot point to these things yet. But the trouble you can picture is not the whole of what is possible. Let the unknown include something kind. You need not know what is ahead to stop treating the rest of your life as though it has already been decided.
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