The Becoming of Human Possibility: A Life-Scale Perspective — 2 Temporal Actualisation

Possibility is not a static stockpile; it is phased through time, continually reconfigured by the ongoing interplay of potential and actual. In a human life, moments do not exist as isolated points but as temporal nodes where relational potential is cut into actuality. Each choice, each encounter, each reflection is an event that shapes the horizon of future possibilities.

Time in human becoming is perspectival: it is lived, experienced, and structured by memory, anticipation, and attention. The unfolding of possibility is therefore both forward-reaching and retrospectively interpreted. Early experiences condition later potentials; later insights reframe earlier moments. Temporality is not a neutral container but an active medium through which possibility is constrained, guided, and expanded.

Understanding temporal actualisation allows us to see how a life is composed not as a sequence of discrete facts but as a relationally organised trajectory. Human possibility is always contextual: it is shaped by prior history, symbolic structures, and the ongoing emergence of relations in the world. By tracing these temporal threads, we can begin to understand how potential becomes lived actuality, moment by moment, over the span of a lifetime.