What is the Future Anyway? Is it as Scary as it Seems? And what does it have to do with Me?

It's another day, and I am at the computer again trying to make sense of the world around me and trying again to recognize the heralding of the future-- the warnings, admonitions,  recommendations and demands of a time not yet manifest but potently present in all our dreams and fears, anxiety and hope, intuitions and subtle thoughts. That is what this is about, the Future We Follow. In his 1905 The LIfe of Reason, the American philosopher George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I had to look that up because I know the saying but never knew where it came from. Apparently, Winston Churchill paraphrased it in a 1948 speech to the House of Commons. According to the National Churchill Museum Blog, Churchill also seems to have been interested in our ability to look toward the future: “When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”—House of Commons, 2 May 1935. You can imagine what was happening in the world in 1935. I certainly hope what we face today is not comparable to the activity in 1935, but I would consider it irresponsible to ignore the shifts in the global structure of society in which we find ourselves today and the dangers they might bring. This is why I've begun to write these often discardable essays to a still non-existent audience. With hope that we are not "want of foresight," that we are not unwilling to act, that we will not wait "until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong," I try to look at what is in an effort to see what will be. This is a little something I can do. A drop in the bucket, as they say. But the ocean is made of so many drops. I intentionally avoided all things political, all things civic and socio-economic that extended beyond what I felt to be the reach of my own direct action, for many years. The situation has changed now. Or I have changed. The future exists now in tremendous potential, potential to manifest in many ways, some of them scary. If Churchill could have seen into the future, I wonder if his words would have been stronger. We live in glimpses of time molded by what was and what is yet to be. As we study the patterns of the past, we must also keep an eye on the horizon. Two different capacities, both based on keen observation. One more imaginative, but both essential. We must all be Janus, gods of two faces.