I’m throwing darts at the wall, I’m casting out fishing lines, anything that might anchor a moment in place and give me a better grasp of the future before it falls like sand through my fingers and drops into the collection bucket of yesterday that’s piled high with To Do Lists, photos and the taste of Bird's custard. It’s almost a sport this balancing act of tomorrow and yesterday.
If the future is a sport, it’s one we all play. I’ll be this, I’ll be that, and as technology increases our ability to preserve what we thought, felt, looked like, and inelegantly danced like, so does our ability to look back from that future pedestal which has morphed into the present and go – oh, that wasn’t what I planned.
I’m playing the game as I write this, casting my net into the future with the idea that I could look back on these words and think "you wrote that before you were a writer, before you were published". Maybe on that future plinth I’ll smile and think "you were a writer all along"; or I won’t.
I used to pattern my life with weekend plans, years and lunch-breaks but not right now. I have shrunk the future. I have compartmentalised it into manageable, measurable chunks. What we’ll eat tonight from the fridge, what work I need to do for this next hour, which plants need watering, where we’ll go for our daily walk.
It sounds like a naïve statement but my job is about trying to create change, to do our best to stem the larger wave that’s coming beyond Covid-19. I liked to think of myself as someone who was fighting for the future but more and more I have shown myself to be a person who enjoys hiding in the here and now. Someone who basks in the warmth but looks away from the growing fire. Is it wrong to say that I’ve liked the pandemic for the distraction?