In the First Country, the people had always spoken of the future as though it were a place.
The past was behind them.
The present was beneath their feet.
And the future was somewhere ahead, beyond the mountains.
Children were told that when they grew older they would travel into it.
Old people said they had come a long way through it.
Maps were drawn with arrows pointing towards it.
But no one had ever seen the future.
One day a child asked the oldest philosopher:
“Where is it?”
The philosopher pointed towards the horizon.
“There.”
“What is there?”
“The future.”
The child thought for a moment.
“What is it made of?”
The philosopher looked at the horizon.
He had no answer.
So the two of them set out to find it.
They walked beyond the city.
They crossed the river.
They passed the great wall.
They climbed the hill from which the whole country could be seen.
Still there was no future.
There were fields.
There were forests.
There were roads.
There were clouds.
There were birds.
But nowhere could they find a place called Tomorrow.
At last the child said:
“Perhaps the future is not a place.”
The philosopher smiled.
“Perhaps.”
They sat beneath a tree.
Beside them lay a seed.
“What is that?” asked the child.
“A seed.”
“What will it become?”
“A plant, if the conditions are right.”
The child looked carefully at the seed.
“But it isn't a plant.”
“No.”
“Then where is the plant?”
The philosopher pointed to the seed.
“Not there.”
He pointed towards the earth.
“Not there either.”
He looked at the rain clouds.
“Not there.”
The child frowned.
“Then how can you say that the seed may become a plant?”
The philosopher picked up the seed.
“Because the present is not indifferent to what may follow from it.”
The child did not understand.
So the philosopher took her to the top of a hill.
A round stone lay at the edge.
He placed his hand behind it.
“Where will it go?”
The child pointed downhill.
“Perhaps there.”
“Why?”
“Because of the hill.”
“And if I place it somewhere else?”
They moved the stone.
The possible paths changed.
“If the ground were different?”
“The paths would change again.”
“And if there were a wall?”
“The stone could not go that way.”
The philosopher nodded.
“You see?”
The child looked puzzled.
“I see the hill.”
“You are seeing more than that.”
He pointed to the ground.
“The future is not simply what happens next.”
He paused.
“It is what can happen next.”
The child looked down at the stone.
For the first time she understood that the future was not waiting at the bottom of the hill.
It was present in the relation between the stone and the landscape.
The philosophers returned to the city and announced their discovery.
The people were intrigued.
So they began looking for the future in everything.
A seed contained a relation to a possible plant.
A door contained a relation to possible passage.
A road contained relations to possible journeys.
A cloud contained relations to possible rain.
A piece of music contained relations to possible continuations.
They discovered that no future existed by itself.
A future was always for something.
A plant was a possible future for a seed.
A journey was a possible future for a traveller.
Passage was a possible future for someone standing before a doorway.
There was no such thing as the possible future floating independently over the country.
There were only possibilities arising from particular presents.
This troubled the King.
“If the future depends upon the present,” he asked, “does that mean everything is already determined?”
The philosophers shook their heads.
“No.”
“Then what determines what will happen?”
“Nothing determines all of it.”
“But something must.”
“The present establishes a field of possibilities.”
“How many?”
“We cannot always know.”
“And which one will become real?”
“We cannot always know that either.”
The King became impatient.
“Then what good is possibility?”
The youngest philosopher answered:
“It tells us that the future is neither arbitrary nor already written.”
The King frowned.
“Explain.”
The philosopher took him to the crossroads outside the city.
Three roads led from it.
One climbed the mountain.
One descended towards the river.
One disappeared into the forest.
“All three are open,” said the philosopher.
“Yes.”
“Does that mean all three will be taken?”
“No.”
“Does it mean only one could ever have been taken?”
The King looked at the roads.
“No.”
“Then the present does not contain a single future.”
“No.”
“Nor does it contain every imaginable future.”
“No.”
“It contains a field of possible continuations.”
The King looked at the three roads.
“And when one is taken?”
The philosopher smiled.
“Then the country changes.”
They walked down the mountain road.
At the bottom they found that a bridge had collapsed.
The King stared.
“We cannot continue.”
“Not by this road.”
“So the future has changed.”
“Yes.”
“But nothing happened to us.”
“Something happened to the world in which our next action is possible.”
The King began to understand.
The actual future was not simply one possibility removed from a list.
When something became actual, the relations of the present changed.
And when those relations changed, the possibilities changed with them.
The King returned to the palace and ordered the scholars to draw a map of this strange process.
They drew:
Present relations
→
Possible continuations
→
What becomes actual
→
New relations
→
New possible continuations
They drew arrows in a great circle.
But the circle was never quite the same circle twice.
For every actual becoming altered the situation from which the next possibilities arose.
The people called this process Becoming.
And they discovered that becoming was not like travelling along a road that had existed before the traveller arrived.
The road itself could change.
A bridge could collapse.
A new path could be built.
A forest could grow.
A river could change its course.
A seed could become a tree.
And the tree could then provide shade in which another seed could grow.
The future was therefore not a destination.
It was something continually generated through the transformation of relations.
One evening, the child who had first asked where the future was returned to the hill.
She had grown older now.
The stone was still there.
The road was still there.
But the landscape had changed.
She looked towards the horizon.
There was still no future waiting beyond the mountains.
She looked beneath her feet.
There was no future there either.
Instead she saw the country itself differently.
Everywhere she looked, the present seemed to open onto something that was not yet actual.
Not everything.
Not anything.
But something.
A seed opened towards a plant.
A doorway opened towards passage.
A road opened towards journeys.
A living creature opened towards actions.
A world opened towards its possible continuations.
She remembered what the old philosopher had once said:
The future is what can happen next.
But now she thought that even this was not quite enough.
For what could happen next depended upon what happened now.
And what happened now would change what could happen after that.
She took out her old book and wrote:
The future is not something we move towards. It is what the present leaves open as it becomes.
She thought for a while.
Then she added:
And what becomes actual changes the opening.
She closed the book.
The country before her was not a finished world with an unfinished future attached to it.
It was a world continually becoming another world.
And perhaps that was why the future could never be found.
For wherever the people went looking for it, they found only the present.
But the present was never merely present.
It was always already standing in relation to what had not yet happened.
The child—now no longer a child—looked towards the horizon once more.
The mountains were still there.
Beyond them, nothing waited.
And yet the country was full of futures.
Not hidden somewhere ahead.
Not written somewhere above.
But opening, everywhere, from the relations of what was already there.
She smiled.
Perhaps, she thought, the future is not a country we enter.
Perhaps it is the opening through which a country becomes another country.
And with that thought came the next question, one more difficult than any they had asked before:
What does it mean for a world to afford a future?
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