The ability to gaze forward in time is an essentially human trait. We have the ability to use our imaginations to see and to feel the future—to imagine that victory and feel the thrill of it, to visualize that loss and feel the sorrow of it. Our imaginations engage our emotions so we begin to weep or to rejoice over what has not yet come to pass and what may never come to pass.
If this pandemic has taught us anything, surely it’s taught us that we are lousy prognosticators. The best of our politicians, the best of our scientists, the best of our statisticians, could not, between them, do much of anything to predict how far the virus would spread, how quickly it would move, how many lives it would claim. The greatest optimists and greatest pessimists alike were often shown to be wrong not just by small degrees, but by whole orders of magnitude. They looked at the present, they made their predictions of the future, and they got it so very wrong.
Many have taken the opportunity to disparage such experts for being so wide of the mark, but a moment’s reflection ought to show that we are all prone to make poor predictions about the future. A little humility ought to show that our rate of success is every bit as bad, that our prophecies are just as often proven false. Yet our past failures rarely stop us from future attempts.
I wonder if you have ever pondered the reality that much of our worry, much of our fear, much of our anxiety, comes from predicting the future. The ability to gaze forward in time is an essentially human trait. We have the ability to use our imaginations to see and to feel the future—to imagine that victory and feel the thrill of it, to visualize that loss and feel the sorrow of it. Our imaginations engage our emotions so we begin to weep or to rejoice over what has not yet come to pass and what may never come to pass. This is a feature of our humanity, not a bug, I’m sure, for it guides us toward what is desirable and guides us away from what would cause us pain.
But I wonder if you have ever pondered the associated reality that, as we gaze into the future, as we imagine what may be, we are far better at projecting grief than grace. The future we imagine, and the future we begin to feel, is far more often bleak than lush, far more often painful than promising. The fantasies we conjure are of harm, not help, of sorrow, not support. Ed Welch says it well: “Worriers are visionaries minus the optimism.”
