We forget a lot of the past. We …

We forget a lot of the past. We are confused about the present and we are ignorant about the future.

There’s a brutal little epistemology in that sentence:

We forget much of the past.
We’re confused about the present.
We’re ignorant of the future.

And yet we conduct ourselves as though we possess all three.

We turn incomplete memories into coherent biographies. We mistake our current interpretation for a clear view of what’s happening. Then we project that interpretation forward and call it a plan.

Human life is a strange journey through time. The past appears to be behind us, but parts of it keep disappearing or changing shape. The present is beneath our feet, but we can see only a small patch of it. The future remains outside the frame, even as we make appointments, promises and five-year plans as though we’ve already inspected it.

Forgetting, confusion and ignorance may not be failures in the system. They may be the conditions under which consciousness operates. If we remembered everything, understood the present completely and knew what was coming, there would be little room for interpretation, choice or genuine encounter. We would merely execute the script.

Memory is already a form of storytelling. The present is a negotiation among competing stories. The future is the territory those stories are trying to colonise.

This calls for three kinds of humility:

• Toward the past: my memory isn’t the event.
• Toward the present: my frame isn’t the whole situation.
• Toward the future: my expectation isn’t a prophecy.

But we still have to move. That’s the rub. We don’t get to wait for certainty before living.

We make decisions in a present we barely understand, using memories we’ve partly reconstructed, in service of futures we can’t see.

This isn’t exactly reassuring, but it does loosen certainty’s grip. Certainty was never part of the equipment. Attention, interpretation, revision and courage are what we have to work with.