Unwritten

What is it about the future that makes us question the present? Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?¹

It seems we think of the future as a place, a destination to get to and stop, an end to something. To me, though, it isn’t a place – it’s more a feeling. A question without punctuation, a blank page on which to write with tomorrow’s ink, a door with no handle.

It’s quite strange how something so abstract, that doesn’t exist yet, can feel so heavy. So present. It manages to sit on our shoulders like an invisible valise of sorts – a valise with the size of a pea and the weight of an elephant. A white elephant, perhaps. Indisposable, unavoidable, yet an inescapable burden.

Still, we carry it willingly. We obsess over it. We let go of the past because we know it’s unchangeable – and we hold tight the future we know is unwritten. Why do we place hope in the unwritten? Why do we use the unwritten to measure the present? Measuring by not what it is, but what it is not yet?

We’re all just standing at the edge of now, peering keenly into an abyss we call the future, trying to make out the shapes we surely see in the fog. When those shapes come true, we rename them. We call them “now.” And yet again they aren’t enough – we search for more. And when it doesn’t, we stumble through time like children playing dress-up in grown-up dreams.

Still, we dream anyway. Because there’s comfort in the unwritten. It can’t disappoint me yet. It hasn’t failed me yet. It hasn’t come undone. And maybe that’s why we romanticize it so hard — not because of what it is, but because of what it isn’t. But the thing is… we never really get to the future. We only ever get to now. And then another now. And another.

Maybe that’s why we romanticize it so much. Hoping that we can write the unwritten, even when it’s writing itself. We like to pretend like the future is waiting – patient, polite – sitting cross-legged just across the bridge of time. It feels so close, we can almost reach out to her, but she’s impatient, really. She crashes in through the windows, scribbling over my plans. And tomorrow she’ll wear yesterday’s clothes and a new name.

What’s unwritten holds every possibility – and that’s terrifying. Freeing, too. It’s the part of the book where anything can still happen. The lines flow, page to page, but there’s nothing on them yet. Yet. We can imagine what the words will be, but they’ll write themselves in due time.

But also… nothing’s happened yet. And that’s what makes it enticing to sit and ponder about. Not the expectation, not the hope – but rather the way we stand in the present, imagining what those words might be.