After the people of the First Country had discovered that constraints gave shape to possibility, they became fascinated by the future.
They wanted to know what might happen next.
So they built a great hall.
On its walls they painted everything they could imagine.
Mountains with wings.
Rivers flowing upwards.
Stones that spoke.
Trees that walked.
A moon made of glass.
A city beneath the sea.
A King who became a sparrow.
A sparrow who became a King.
The people wandered through the hall in delight.
“Look!” they cried.
“All these things are possible!”
But an old woman who had been sitting quietly beside the door shook her head.
“No.”
The people were surprised.
“You cannot deny what you can see.”
“I do not deny that you can imagine them.”
“Then why are they not possible?”
The old woman pointed towards the painted mountain.
“Can that mountain fly?”
“In the painting.”
“And can a real mountain fly?”
The people laughed.
“Of course not.”
“Then imagination and possibility are not the same thing.”
The people did not like this.
They had thought that possibility was simply the name given to whatever the mind could picture without contradiction.
So they summoned the philosophers.
The philosophers came.
They examined the paintings.
They agreed that the people had imagined many things.
But when asked whether imagination made them possible, they hesitated.
Finally the youngest philosopher said:
“Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong place.”
“Where should we look?”
“Not at the thing we imagine.”
“Then at what?”
“At the world in which it would have to happen.”
This answer sent the people out of the hall.
They went first to the courtyard, where a child was holding a stone.
“Could this stone float?” they asked.
The child threw it into the air.
It rose.
Then it fell.
“But suppose,” said the child, “we imagined that it remained there.”
“Would imagining it make it possible?”
The child thought.
“No.”
“What would?”
The child looked at the stone.
“Perhaps something would have to be different.”
The philosophers smiled.
They remembered the Doorway.
They remembered the Road.
They remembered the Great Well.
Possibility, they realised, did not belong to things considered in isolation.
It belonged to situations.
A stone could float in one situation and fall in another.
A traveller could cross a river in one situation and remain on the bank in another.
A door could permit passage in one relation and deny it in another.
The same thing could participate in different possibilities because the relations constituting the situation had changed.
The people began calling these situations fields of becoming.
“What can happen?” they asked.
And instead of looking into the empty distance of the future, they looked around them.
What relations are present?
What differences do they establish?
What constraints do they create?
What paths remain open?
They discovered that the future was not a warehouse filled with events waiting to be unpacked.
Nor was it an infinite kingdom in which anything could happen.
It was more like a landscape emerging from the present.
The paths were not all visible.
But neither were they arbitrary.
One evening, the King asked the philosophers whether they could tell him what would happen tomorrow.
They replied:
“No.”
The King was disappointed.
“Then what use is your philosophy?”
The eldest philosopher bowed.
“We cannot tell you which future will become actual.”
“But surely you can tell me something.”
“We can tell you which futures the present leaves open.”
The King considered this.
“Only one?”
“No, Majesty.”
“Then tomorrow is not determined?”
“Not necessarily.”
“But nor can anything happen?”
“Not necessarily.”
The philosopher smiled.
“The present does not choose a single future for us. But neither does it surrender us to anything whatsoever.”
He picked up a stone.
“From this stone, many things may follow.”
He placed it on the table.
“But not everything.”
The King nodded.
For the first time, he understood that there could be several futures without there being an arbitrary future.
The possibilities of tomorrow were not waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.
They were being differentiated now.
The people began to understand the strange temporality of possibility.
A possibility did not have to exist as a thing before it could become actual.
It could exist as an opening.
A path that might be taken.
A passage that might be crossed.
A form that might emerge.
A consequence that might follow.
Possibility was therefore not something standing in the future.
It was something present in the relations of the present.
Then the philosophers returned once more to the Great Well.
They stood beyond the boundary they had studied before.
One philosopher looked into the darkness.
“I can imagine a traveller returning from there,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I can describe it.”
“Yes.”
“I can tell a story about it.”
“Yes.”
“Then in what sense is it impossible?”
The eldest philosopher answered:
“Because the world does not owe reality to our stories.”
The younger philosopher was silent.
The old philosopher continued:
“You can imagine a future that the present does not leave open.”
“So imagination can reach farther than possibility?”
“Sometimes.”
“And possibility cannot?”
“Possibility is not about how far we can imagine.”
“What is it about?”
The old philosopher looked around at the strange geometry of the Well.
“It is about how far the present can become.”
The words remained with them.
How far the present can become.
They carried them home.
The artists painted fewer impossible mountains.
The children still imagined talking stones, because children are not easily persuaded to abandon useful impossibilities.
But the philosophers began to make a distinction.
They asked of every imagined future:
“Is this merely conceivable?”
Then they asked:
“What relations would have to hold for this to become actual?”
Sometimes the answer was:
“Those relations could exist.”
Sometimes:
“They do not exist here, but they might.”
Sometimes:
“They are excluded by the present structure of things.”
And sometimes the answer was:
“We do not yet know.”
The last answer became their favourite.
For they had learned that possibility was not certainty disguised as hope.
Nor was it ignorance disguised as freedom.
It was an opening established by the relations of what already existed.
The future therefore became a different kind of thing in their thinking.
It was not a place.
It was not a collection.
It was not a hidden chamber filled with events.
It was something more elusive.
A relation.
The present stood on one side.
What had not yet happened stood on the other.
Between them lay the openings through which becoming might occur.
One evening, the youngest philosopher climbed the hill outside the city.
Below him he could see the roads branching through the country.
Some were open.
Some were blocked.
Some joined.
Some divided.
Some disappeared beyond the horizon.
He realised that no traveller could see the whole country from where she stood.
Yet every traveller stood somewhere.
And from that somewhere, certain journeys were possible.
Others were not.
The philosopher smiled.
Perhaps this was what the people had been calling the future.
Not something waiting ahead.
Not something already written.
But a relation between where the world is and what it may become.
He took out his book.
For a long time he wrote nothing.
Then, at last, he wrote a single sentence:
A future is not a thing that waits ahead of the present. It is what the present stands in relation to as it becomes.
He closed the book.
The sun was setting.
Beyond the hill, the roads continued into the gathering darkness.
And although he could not see where they led, he knew something he had not known before:
The unseen was not necessarily impossible.
But neither was everything unseen possible.
Between imagination and reality lay the mysterious country of the possible.
And its borders were drawn, not by what the mind could picture, but by what the present left open.
Which raised a question even stranger than all those that had come before:
If a future is a relation to what has not yet happened, what kind of relation can we have to something that does not yet exist?
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