Future Infinitive – Unit 3, Week 6

Last week while watching moments begin and end, I observed myself in the act of ‘freezing’ experience by ‘coming-out‘ as an identity located here. And I also alternately relaxed or released that identity and its location, by returning to the edge of the future with an open and welcoming attitude toward the unknown. By taking a perspective at the open edge of the future, self-projecting concerns into the future were halted, and the cycle of reaching back to the past that fed into the present was stopped, at least long enough for me to see what was happening. The present, thus, proceeded openly, without the ownership and location that normally comes from triangulating between me, the past, and an imagined future.

In terms of my experience, employment of this new metaphor at ‘the edge of the future‘, and its shift of attitude toward the future’s open potential – the ‘future infinitive‘, (and NOT projecting ideas into it), time was in a sense restored to time. My exercise of looking over the contours of the land became a flow that did not depend on moments.  Experience was actually more fundamentally prior, and time was a dynamic continuum. The ‘now’ was widened or expanded between alternating incidents of ‘coming-out‘ and ‘freezing’ time by means of location and distance, or receding into time by relinquishing them. Here was a modulation of focus, present to both the self’s ‘coming-out‘ tendency as well as the melting of its frozen positions. In a sense the now contained the past and the present, and the future-infinitive provided the open, potential of the not-known. And it was from this source the sense of aliveness came from the future, filling the present to the brim.

David