OCTOBER 31, MONDAY

LIVING IN THE FUTURE

I am puzzled by how much of my life I‘ve lived in the future. Something in my human DNA makes me feel more alive when I live in the future, because, of course, you can‘t live in the future, the future is virtual, just an idea, just a dream. But something inside me shuts down when I live only in the present as if the present is the end of the line. I am much more alive when floating along in imagination in the future.

I mentioned earlier the feeling I have in the days before end of the trip as if I am not there any more but am already home. But then after I have been here for a few days if I am trapped in the present without a future I freeze up and become immobilized. But then something begins to imagine a future again and I come back to life.

So a week after I arrived back as I sat here comatose, Scott‘s Cheap Flights offered Europe from Asheville in the $500s and I realized that the window of cheap flights in January was about to close, and began slowly to gain enthusiasm. I was back in the future again, dreaming of a few days in Paris, a few days in Helsinki, wandering around India and a month in Amsterdam. As my imagination made all of these places shine brighter and brighter, more and more intense, more and more real, I was no longer completely here but floating in the future and becoming more and more cheerful.

When I mention India to friends, they talk about poverty, about terrorists, about being silently robbed, of getting sick and vomiting all day. This is a gloomy and dangerous future of their imagination that they don‘t want to live within. They‘d much prefer to stay right here. Of course that future isn‘t any more real than my imagined future, they don‘t want to enter that imagined future and I do, I don‘t know why. So we must feel differently about living in the future, instead of enriching their lives the future is a source of worry and fear. Some people feel that way about the present and want to go back to the equally unreal good old days.

But in any case, just dreaming of travel and living in the imagined and unreal future has gotten me going again and feels very good. Strange.

But come to think of it, this must be one of the functions of going to heaven, a future that many people live in which makes the present bearable, a future that makes them feel very alive. And the transition is just like letting go of a trip abroad and being back home before you ever get there.

I‘ll settle for India but in my doddering old age, with death just around the corner, I am probably missing out by not anticipating heaven and beginning to let go of the long trip that I have been on.