how to keep the future to yourself

in praise of action

1. The future is more so a series of tiny pixels clicking into place than a lucid destination. Remember that scene in the original 1971 Willy Wonka film? Where Mike TeaVee’s vanity is punished by imprisoning him on a television screen, but only after he is sliced into incoherent pixel-bits above everyone’s heads? It’s like that, except it may take days, months, years , lifetimes to appear, and the reveal is never exactly as you imagined. Sometimes, even, these future-bent pixels stay twinkling above the crowd forever, never landing, or, chopped up and resold in parts to others’ consciousness.

2. The nature of the future is so far from the certainty of a statement.

3. The immediate impulse to share a potential idea or plan before any semblance of birth should come as your first warning. Something inside me wants to say it is like a premature baby , but it isn’t even that, as it is so far from both birth and conception. If anything, it is the first suggestive glance across the room to a possible mate. A possible mate that hasn’t even caught that glance yet.

4. Like any gilded speech or toast, one made from yourself about yourself serves the same purpose. A flattering spectacle. A crafted offering of celebration or attention that concludes as soon as it appears, followed by an applause that is baked into the design. It is like swallowing once the water enters your mouth, or smiling back at a stranger. Praise after a presentation is automatic, a formality. Any assuring nods and accolades received about your great future idea are a shallow swallow in the name of survival. Fake excitement, real excitement. It doesn’t matter. More fuel on a fire-less fire-pit is just a bucket of sludge.

5. Sharing my idea will give me the accountability to do it! or maybe , I am just excited and expressing myself! are said internally, comforting the one who knows in the base of their bowels that blurting out potential is a foolish impulse. Like the proclamation of the idea itself, these self-soothing explanations also mean nothing.

6. When an idea is nothing but a short-sighted glance, sharing it out-loud is only a desperate attempt at identity-assertion. It is presenting a pie to your social group that reads “Trust me, I am interesting” or “Trust me, I am cool” or “The genius my third grade teacher saw in me actually exists”. It allows a cheap moment of recognition or glory. A short, dull high from paint fumes.

7. An idea is most likely to come to fruition when less people are told about it. And this isn’t because of any superstition, evil-eye, or blessing-blocking witchcraft. It’s just that the more genuinely tapped into something you are, the more likely you are to patiently, silently commune with it as an entity, following its movements and moods. It is a deeper relationship, one guided by an internal vehicle so large that it cannot sustain on the inferior fuel derived from microscopic ego bumps of could-be’s and should-have-beens.

8. Keeping the future to yourself will not guarantee it happens. But, finding that you are keeping the future to yourself is a sign that you are far more likely to make it happen.

9. This isn’t an invitation to hole yourself up in a tower like a mad scientist, avoiding your peers as you mutter to yourself “Wait until they see! I’ll show them!” , as this is the same fruitless format warned against prior, but with a more faux-time-travel, dimension-hopping style to it. Once again, a genuine romance with an idea is not guided by weak attempts at controlling others perception of you. No romance can function in those conditions.

10. You keep the future to yourself by understanding its lack of form. There is nothing to keep, prove, perform, boast, weigh, suffocate - until there is. An idea is an invitation to a sandbox with an infinity pool’s edge. It asks for your hands, not your tongue.



・゜゜・・ﾟ☆ .・゜ ✧・゜゜・・ﾟ☆