We are blessed with a mercurial mind. Sometimes, for example, we feel a mastery of our particular universe. Other times we feel helpless. Sometimes we drift entirely out of this time and space, vividly imagining things that never were nor will be.
It’s a gift of our strange over-developed consciousness. Perhaps even an evolutionary trick to comfort us through pain and hard times, when pure logic would surrender and die. A reminder that no matter how sophisticated we may consider ourselves, we truly exist in not one, but infinite (and infinitely varied) dream times.
Ask me what I know of the future and I would honestly answer “nothing”. But that does not prevent me from sometimes imagining possibilities or what is likely to happen. These visions may inspire or terrify, make me wish I could stick around to find out, or be grateful I will never endure. As I said, mercurial.
Sometimes I do in fact believe I have lived in the best of all possible worlds. An easily disproved conceit. I worry about how things have changed: climate, AI, society. And yet, when I try, I remember so many things I once worried about that never came to pass. Sometimes even the nostalgic past can be a mirage.
While life continues, sometimes also, in its astounding variety and kaleidoscopic fractals.
