How Can You Remember the Future?
Here’s a mind twister to challenge your thinking.
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
–Søren Kierkegaard
How do you make sense of this quote? How is it painful “remembering the future?” Is that even possible? It seems like since the future hasn't happened yet that you can’t remember it. And what does he mean by the future “you’ll never have” as being the most painful?
The way I interpret this is that we allow our imagination to create a future that rarely manifests itself. We use our past experiences for evaluating how our future will be. If that past is painful, then we’ll use it to imagine a painful future.
But we don’t just have the past to create our future. We also have the present. We can focus our attention on our current situation to gather objective information. Then we can use that information and our past experiences to take action to manifest the future we want.
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
–Søren Kierkegaard
How do you make sense of this quote? How is it painful “remembering the future?” Is that even possible? It seems like since the future hasn't happened yet that you can’t remember it. And what does he mean by the future “you’ll never have” as being the most painful?
The way I interpret this is that we allow our imagination to create a future that rarely manifests itself. We use our past experiences for evaluating how our future will be. If that past is painful, then we’ll use it to imagine a painful future.
But we don’t just have the past to create our future. We also have the present. We can focus our attention on our current situation to gather objective information. Then we can use that information and our past experiences to take action to manifest the future we want.
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