This blog is the first in a series of blogs that I hope to start writing weekly. As a writer, I feel that I let my mind waste away at times, and I need to start using all the jumbled up thoughts in my head for a greater good. So, expect to see a deep and meaningful blog around this time every week. The topics will be whatever happens to be on my mind at the time I sit down to write, so expect the unexpected. I'm sooooo getting the highest bloggers badge. :-). Anyway, here we go:

Sometimes I believe I was born an insomniac for a reason... After all, some of my best ideas have come to me late at night, and some of the subjects that I write on wouldn't exist if I was sleeping soundly in my bed. Instead, I lie here in bed typing on the tiny keyboard of my iPhone, pondering at all the unanswered questions that exist in my world. I just finished watching a curious movie called Paycheck. It was about a man who built a machine that could see into the future, but after he built it, his mind was wiped clean of the entire three years it took to build the machine. As he looked into the future, he came to realize that he would forget everything, so he left himself a set of items that would help him survive in the future... Really, it's almost impossible to explain the depth of this movie... It's just something you have to sit down and watch. But the movie got me thinking about the concept of the future and what it means to all of us. Follow my thoughts on the future and see if you see reflections of your life in the process.

We as humans always are trying to predict the future so that we can know what is going to happen in our lives. We do this through meteorology, medical imaging techniques, fortune tellers, fortune cookies, meditation, horoscopes, and even predictions like Nostradamus made. We seek to know the future so that we won't be surprised by what life has in store for us. We want to be able to shape our futures if we can. I think a large part of this is that we want to believe that we are in control of our own destiny. God isn't in control, nature isn't in control... We have to be. Because without control there is chaos, and we can't afford any more chaos in our lives. Trying to control the future is good to some extent, but taken too far can lead to ultimate disaster.

In the movie, the lead character discovers that people will tear themselves apart with the knowledge of the future. We go to war, because the future said that someone would declare war on us. Eventually, the world ends up in s nuclear holocaust simply because humans tried to stop the events that were to take place... They fulfilled the premonition of war that could have been stopped had we not first declared war. Perhaps the example in the movie is too grand for this thought. Allow me to shrink the example down: Say you are a CEO of a company. You have a lot of stock in this company. And you get word that the company was going to go under and the stock would become worthless. You decide to sell all your shares, and because you started dumping all your shares, everyone else does too. This leads to the collapse of the company. The company did indeed fail, but it was due to the fact that you sold the shares in the first place. You caused the event that you saw in the future. By trying to save yourself, you caused the problem in the first place..... Clearly trying to stop the future can instead lead to its fulfillment.

There is a question as to if our futures are set in stone. I believe that the answer is no. Why would humans have free will if we had no choice in our futures? I believe that the future is always changing, and that nothing is ever set in stone. If we try to predict our futures, we end up living in the future, instead of living in the day. Humans always have a tendency to live in the future: What will life be like after that promotion? Will her and I work out long term? Where will I be 20 years down the road? These questions act like a poison, because they get into our minds, and end up dominating the conscious and subconscious thought. We end up so caught up in the future, that our lives pass before us, and that dream future is no more. We shape the future by what we do today... If we live solely in the future, we lose the chance to shape the future as we want to. Instead, we end up another path, far from what we originally desired.

I realize that this is a lot to think about... And since it's four in the morning, I question how well constructed my argument is. I would like to explore one final thought, and that is a quote from the movie. The lead character summarizes that "If we know the future, we have no future." Dictionary.com defines the word future as "undetermined events that will occur in that time." So by the simple definition, that theory is proved to be correct. If we know the future, then there will be nothing left undetermined. I would like to take it a step farther. I think that there is something magical about the future. Something that draws us to it. Something that makes the unknown both scary and exciting. If we knew everything from the beginning, there would be no magic, and the allure of the future as we see it would be lost. Not only that, but if we are only living in the future, and we are no longer living and making changes in the present, then we are condemning ourselves to only one pathway. By knowing the future, we have no future, because we lose the ability to successfully change the future as nature intended us to. Nature is a powerful force, and we shouldn't try to break its natural laws.

Carpe diem... Seize the day. Grab the day and don't let it escape. Live for the day, and don't live for tomorrow. For when we start living and trying to predict the future, we lose the ability to shape it as nature intended for us. If we try and drastically change the future with advanced knowledge... Who knows. In trying to prevent a world war, we might just be the starting point instead. See the power of the future?

Until next week. Your humble servant,

James.