The Future is Behind You

The past is before you. Everything you can see and everything you know is from the past, and in our culture we think of that as behind us, with the future lying in front of us. It's a linear path, and we walk it. In Madagascar they discuss the future as if it is moving in from behind them, with the past splayed out in front as the whole of their experience, everything they have seen and known. I find that oddly refreshing. The past is knowable. The present is vaguely understandable, and will become more so later. We all know that as, "I wish I'd have known then what I know now." The future? We can't see it, it is behind us.

A friend's post out on Ello got me thinking about time this morning. How it is so linear here in the US, how we think of it as slipping away, and how we monetize it. Chop-chop! Time is money! I was working on some cleaning (and lord knows it needs to be done), but I also want to engage with time and experience life inside the moments. 

Just now I wanted to stop and read some blogs and articles. I wanted to share some thoughts and pictures. But the whole time I'm sitting here with a cup of tea reading about time and munching some pumpkin cupcakes, I'm poise to jump out of my chair. Feeling a vague guilt and a sense of the day slipping away, I'm already halfway up. I've got THINGS TO DO. And somehow, over the course of 30 years of married life, there has become a certain self-reproach associated with not producing something tangible with the hours allotted to me in a day. A walk in the woods? Well that's nice and all, but what did you clean, fold, sort, throw away, cook, earn, accomplish? A walk in the woods with a dog? Oh, good job, the dog needed the exercise. 

Sitting at your computer again? What is unsaid is heard, whether it was actually said-unsaid or simply imagined. Time's a wasting. Chop-chop! 

But today, I'm also thinking of Madagascar. I'm thinking of the past that is in front of me, and looking it over there are some really nice things I see there before me. Yes, yes, I am going to do my to-do list because I want things at least some level of picked-up around here. But as the future comes skipping in from behind me I want to make sure that I like what I see as it passes by to become that past which is before me.

(Pictures are clocks in Munich, Germany; Lucerne, Switzerland, Venice, Italy.)