The Seed That Was Not a Tree

The people of the First Country had begun to speak differently about possibility.

They had learned that possibility belonged to the world.

A door could leave a passage open.

A road could leave a journey open.

A river could leave a crossing open.

The shape of things, and the relations between them, determined what could happen.

But then another question began to trouble them.

What, exactly, did it mean to say that something had a potential?

The question first arose in the King's garden.

There was an old gardener who had planted a seed beneath the soil.

“This seed will become a tree,” he said.

The youngest philosopher looked at the earth.

“Is the tree already there?”

The gardener laughed.

“No.”

“Then where is it?”

“In the seed.”

She knelt beside the soil.

She dug carefully until she found the seed.

She held it in her hand.

It was small.

There was no miniature tree inside it.

No tiny branches.

No leaves.

No hidden trunk.

Yet everyone in the garden still spoke as though the tree were somehow already there.

She carried the seed to the oldest philosopher.

“If the tree is not inside the seed,” she asked, “what does it mean to say that the seed has the potential to become a tree?”

The old philosopher took the seed from her.

“Let us see.”

He placed it upon a stone.

Nothing happened.

He placed it in dry sand.

Nothing happened.

He placed it beneath the shade of a wall.

Nothing happened.

Then he returned it to the garden.

The gardener planted it again.

He gave it water.

The sun warmed the soil.

Days passed.

The seed changed.

A small root appeared.

Then a shoot.

Then leaves.

The youngest philosopher watched.

“Was the tree hidden in the seed after all?”

The old philosopher shook his head.

“Look around.”

She looked.

The soil.

The water.

The sunlight.

The air.

The warmth.

The passing of time.

The gardener's care.

The creatures living beneath the ground.

The seed was not becoming a tree alone.

It was becoming a tree in a world.

The philosopher understood.

The potential had never been a little future object stored inside the seed.

It had belonged to the seed in relation to everything around it.

The old philosopher pointed toward the garden wall.

“Change the soil.”

The youngest philosopher imagined the seed lying in dry stone.

“Then it may not grow.”

“Change the water.”

“It may wither.”

“Change the temperature.”

“It may cease to develop.”

“Remove the light.”

“Its becoming changes again.”

The old philosopher nodded.

“Then where is its potential?”

The youngest philosopher looked at the seedling.

“Not simply inside it.”

The gardener overheard them.

“Where, then?”

She touched the young stem.

“In the relation between what it is and the world in which it grows.”

The news spread through the country.

Soon people began testing the idea.

A swimmer came to the river.

He was strong and knew how to swim.

But the river had dried.

He stood upon the stones.

His ability remained.

Yet there was no swimming.

The youngest philosopher watched him.

“Does he still have the potential to swim?”

The old philosopher considered this.

“He has the capacity.”

“But no possibility?”

“Not here.”

The swimmer looked at the empty riverbed.

Nothing about his body had changed.

The world had changed around him.

His readiness remained, but the opportunity had disappeared.

Later they came to a deep lake.

The water was clear and calm.

Swimming was possible.

But beside the lake stood a child who had never learned.

The water opened a possibility.

The child could not yet take it up.

The possibility was present.

The relevant potential was not.

The youngest philosopher began to see that the two words had been describing different things all along.

Possibility belonged to the field.

Potential belonged to the participant within the field.

Neither was sufficient by itself.

An open door did not make everyone capable of passing through it.

A capable traveller did not make every door open.

A river did not make every creature a swimmer.

A swimmer did not create a river.

The two had to meet.

But even then, the meeting was not guaranteed.

For the world could change.

The participant could change.

The relations between them could change.

And with every change, what was possible for that participant could change as well.

One afternoon, the King brought a strange machine to the Hall of Inventions.

It was the first of its kind in the First Country.

It could carry messages farther than a horse could travel.

The people gathered around it.

The machine made something possible that had never been possible before.

But not everyone could use it.

Some understood it immediately.

Some needed to learn.

Some could not reach it.

Some were forbidden to touch it.

Some had no reason to use it at all.

The machine had changed the field of possibility.

But it had not given every participant the same potential.

The youngest philosopher thought about this.

“When a new possibility appears,” she said, “it does not automatically become an achievement.”

The old philosopher nodded.

“It changes the field in which potential can operate.”

“And if someone learns to use the machine?”

“Then the participant's relation to the field changes.”

“And if the machine disappears?”

“The possibility changes again.”

She was beginning to understand something even more subtle.

Potential did not have to change because the participant itself had changed.

Sometimes the world changed around it.

The locked door had not made the traveller less able to walk.

The opening of the door had not given him the ability to walk.

It had changed the relation through which his existing ability could be exercised.

The youngest philosopher returned to the garden.

She found the seedling had grown taller.

She touched its leaves.

“What does this tree have the potential to become?”

The gardener smiled.

“That depends.”

“Upon what?”

“Upon the world.”

She looked around.

The tree had space to grow.

The soil was rich.

The river still flowed.

Birds nested in its branches.

Bees visited its flowers.

Children rested beneath its shade.

The tree's future was not written inside it.

Nor was it arbitrary.

It arose from the relations in which the tree participated.

The youngest philosopher remembered the great sequence they had discovered:

RELATION → DIFFERENCE → CONSTRAINT → POSSIBILITY → BECOMING → NEW RELATION

She had once wondered whether potential should be added to the sequence.

Now she saw that this was the wrong question.

Potential was not another step in the journey.

It appeared wherever a participant stood within a field of possibility.

She wrote in the earth:

POSSIBILITY

Then:

What does the world leave open?

Beside it she wrote:

POTENTIAL

What can this participant take up within that opening?

She looked at the two questions.

They faced one another.

The first looked outward, toward the field.

The second looked from the participant into the field.

Neither could be reduced to the other.

And neither was yet becoming.

For possibility was not an achievement.

Potential was not an achievement.

Both concerned what had not yet happened.

But they concerned it from different sides.

The world said:

This remains open.

The participant answered:

This I may be able to take up.

And somewhere between those two statements, the future began to acquire a path.

The youngest philosopher walked to the river.

The swimmer was there again.

This time the water had returned.

He stepped into it.

His capacity had not created the river.

The river had not created his capacity.

But now the two stood in a relation through which swimming could occur.

He pushed away from the bank.

The possibility became an action.

The action became an event.

The event changed the swimmer.

It also changed the river's relation to him.

And the youngest philosopher realised that this was why neither possibility nor potential could be the whole story.

Something happened when they met.

Something became actual.

And what became actual could change the relations from which the next possibilities arose.

That evening, the philosophers gathered beneath the growing tree.

The old philosopher looked at the seedling.

“Do you still think the tree was hidden inside the seed?”

The youngest philosopher smiled.

“No.”

“Then what did the seed have?”

She thought for a long time.

“At first I would have said a potential.”

“And now?”

She looked at the tree, the soil, the river, the sky.

“It had a readiness for certain forms of becoming, constituted through its relations with the world.”

The old philosopher nodded.

“And does that readiness stay the same?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because the relations change.”

“And can the relations change without the seed itself changing?”

She thought of the locked door.

“Yes.”

The old philosopher smiled.

“Then we have learned something important.”

The youngest philosopher looked at him.

“What?”

He pointed toward the path leading from the garden.

“Potential is not what lies before becoming.”

She followed his gaze.

“Then what is it?”

He looked at the seedling.

“Perhaps it is what becomes visible when a participant encounters a possibility.”

The wind moved through the leaves.

The tree had once been a seed.

The seed had once been nothing that anyone would have called a tree.

And yet the future had not been hidden inside it.

It had emerged through the changing relations between the seed and its world.

The youngest philosopher stood beneath the branches.

Then she asked the question that seemed to open another door:

What happens when potential meets possibility?

The Door and the Walker

After the First Country had learned that the world made possibilities through its relations, the people began to notice that two words were often spoken as though they meant the same thing.

Possibility.

Potential.

No one could quite say why the country needed both.

Then, one morning, a traveller came to the King's garden.

There was a door in the garden wall.

It stood open.

Beyond it was a path winding between fig trees, across a little bridge, and down toward the river.

The traveller looked through the doorway.

“Can I go through?”

The gatekeeper nodded.

“Yes.”

The traveller stepped forward.

He was a strong man, accustomed to walking long distances. He could climb hills, cross fields, and follow roads from one end of the country to the other.

He placed his foot across the threshold.

Then he stopped.

An old woman was sitting beside the wall.

She had been watching him.

“Why do you stop?” she asked.

“I am wondering whether I can go through.”

The old woman looked at the open door.

“It seems that you can.”

The traveller laughed.

“Yes. That is what I thought.”

And he walked into the garden.

The next morning, the King ordered the door locked.

The traveller returned.

The garden was unchanged.

The path was still there.

The bridge still crossed the stream.

The fig trees still stood in the sunlight.

The traveller was still strong.

He could still walk.

He placed his hand upon the door.

It would not open.

He pushed.

Nothing happened.

He stepped back.

Then he looked down at his feet.

They were exactly as they had been the day before.

His legs had not weakened.

His strength had not diminished.

He could still walk as far as he pleased.

Yet he could no longer enter the garden.

The old woman was sitting beneath the same tree.

She looked at him.

“What has changed?”

“The door.”

“And you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what has disappeared?”

The traveller looked again at the locked door.

“The way through.”

The old woman nodded.

“The possibility.”

The traveller considered this.

“But I can still walk.”

“Yes.”

He looked puzzled.

“Then perhaps the two things are not the same.”

That evening, the youngest philosopher heard the story.

She went to the garden.

The door was still locked.

She placed her hand upon it.

Then she walked around the wall.

On the other side she found another traveller.

This one was sitting beside the river.

He had a small boat beside him.

He could not climb the wall.

He could not pass through the door.

But the river afforded him another way into the garden.

The youngest philosopher watched him push the boat into the water.

She began to understand.

The same country did not offer the same possibilities to everyone.

The world left some things open.

But what was open to the world was not necessarily something every participant could take up.

She returned to the locked door.

A bird flew over the wall.

A child crawled beneath a gap in the hedge.

A woman walked around the garden.

A man waited beside the river.

The door was one thing.

The possibilities of the country were another.

And each traveller stood differently within them.

The youngest philosopher went to the Hall of Languages.

There, among the old tablets, she found two words written beside one another.

One concerned what might happen.

The other concerned what someone might be prepared or able to do.

She read the tablets several times.

Then she looked out through the high window.

The door.

The traveller.

The garden.

The river.

The boat.

The bird.

Suddenly the distinction seemed clear.

The open door established a possibility.

But the possibility of passage did not tell her whether every traveller could pass through it.

The possibility belonged to the organisation of the place.

The ability belonged to the one who stood within it.

She returned to the garden.

By then the King had unlocked the door again.

The strong traveller arrived.

He walked through.

A woman in a wheeled chair arrived.

She looked at the threshold.

For her, the narrow doorway did not offer the same passage.

The King widened it.

Now she could enter.

Nothing about the garden had changed.

Nothing about her had changed.

But the relation between them had changed.

And with it, something new became possible.

The youngest philosopher stood quietly beside the door.

She thought of the swimmer who had stood beside the dry river.

The water could make swimming possible.

But the water alone could not swim.

She thought of the bird.

The branch could support it.

But the branch did not fly.

She thought of the child who had learned a new word.

The language could make a distinction available.

But the distinction did not enter the child's speech merely because the language permitted it.

There was always something more.

A participant.

A situation.

A relation between them.

The old philosopher came to stand beside her.

She told him what she had discovered.

“So,” he said, “which comes first?”

She looked at the door.

“Possibility?”

“And then?”

“Potential?”

He shook his head.

She thought again.

“No.”

The old philosopher waited.

“Perhaps potential is not something that comes after possibility.”

“Then what is it?”

She looked at the travellers moving through the garden.

“It is what happens when a possibility has a participant.”

The old philosopher smiled.

“Perhaps.”

They watched the strong traveller walk toward the river.

He could swim.

The river was full.

He stepped into the water.

His potential met a possibility.

And something happened.

He crossed.

The youngest philosopher followed him with her eyes.

Perhaps this was the beginning of becoming.

Not possibility alone.

Not potential alone.

But a possibility that a participant could take up.

That night she returned to the Hall of Languages.

She found the two old tablets again.

The first spoke of what might happen.

The second spoke of readiness, inclination, and ability.

She placed them side by side.

Then beneath them she wrote:

What can happen here?

And:

What can this participant do or become here?

She stood back.

The first question seemed to belong to the world.

The second seemed to belong to the participant within the world.

Yet neither could be understood without the other.

For there could be a road without a traveller.

There could be a traveller without a road.

There could be water without a swimmer.

There could be a swimmer without water.

There could be a language in which a distinction could be made, without a speaker yet able to make it.

And there could be a participant ready for something for which the world had made no opening.

Possibility and potential could therefore part company.

The door could be open while the walker was unable to pass.

The walker could be able to walk while the door was closed.

Neither created the other.

Something had to bring them together.

A relation.

The youngest philosopher returned once more to the garden.

The door stood open.

The path beyond it disappeared into the trees.

She stood upon the threshold.

For a moment she did nothing.

Then she stepped forward.

The possibility had been there.

The capacity had been there.

But neither had yet become a journey.

Now it had.

She looked back at the doorway.

It had not moved.

Yet the world was no longer quite the same.

A possibility had been taken up.

Something had become actual.

And because it had become actual, the relations of the country would never again be exactly what they had been.

The youngest philosopher smiled.

Perhaps this was the distinction they had been seeking.

Possibility is what the world leaves open.

Potential is what a participant is ready or able to take up within that opening.

She looked down the path.

Then she wondered:

If possibility is the openness of becoming,

and potential is the readiness to participate in it,

what happens when the two meet?

The World That Makes Possibility

For a long time, the philosophers of the First Country had been asking a simple question.

What is a relation?

At first, they had thought they knew.

A relation was a thread between two things.

A road between villages.

A bridge between banks.

A path between a house and a garden.

A word connecting one thing to another.

A hand reaching for another hand.

The things were there first.

The relations came afterward.

Or so they had believed.

But the country had been teaching them otherwise.

They had learned that when a door opened, the room beyond it became part of what the room could be.

They had learned that a difference could become a constraint, and that a constraint could distinguish one future from another.

They had learned that a road did not merely connect two places.

It changed what could happen between them.

And they had learned that when something happened, the world did not return to what it had been.

A bridge was built.

A village grew.

A path became a road.

A road became a market.

And the relations of the country changed again.

One morning the youngest philosopher climbed the hill above the King's city.

Below her lay the whole First Country.

She could see the river.

The bridge.

The old road.

The forest.

The fields.

The Hall of Languages.

The Great Well, dark beneath the distant hills.

Everything seemed to be where it had always been.

Yet she knew now that this was not enough to describe the country.

For beneath the things she could see ran another country.

A country of openings.

A country of differences.

A country of paths that might be taken and paths that could not.

She sat upon a stone.

Then she asked herself:

“If possibility is not something stored somewhere beyond the world, where does it come from?”

She waited.

The wind moved through the grass.

Then, very slowly, she began to understand.

Perhaps possibility did not come from anywhere.

Perhaps it began whenever things stood in relation to one another.

She picked up two stones.

One lay in her left hand.

The other lay in her right.

By themselves, they seemed to offer very little.

But she placed one beside the other.

Now there was a difference.

She moved one stone closer.

The difference changed.

She placed a third stone between them.

The relation changed again.

And with each change, something else became possible.

A line.

A boundary.

A path.

A wall.

A pattern.

Nothing had been added to the stones.

Yet the possibilities had changed.

The youngest philosopher rose.

She walked down the hill to find the oldest philosopher.

She found him beside the Great Well, watching the shadows move across its rim.

“I think I have found where possibility comes from,” she said.

The old philosopher smiled.

“Where?”

“From relations.”

He looked into the darkness.

“Then tell me what a relation is.”

She hesitated.

“A relation makes a difference.”

“And what does a difference do?”

“It changes what can happen.”

“And what do we call the range of things that can happen?”

She looked toward the country.

“Possibility.”

“And when one of those possibilities happens?”

“Then the world changes.”

“And when the world changes?”

“The relations change.”

The old philosopher nodded.

The youngest philosopher began to speak more quickly now, as though she were following a road she had suddenly discovered beneath her feet.

“Relation makes difference.

Difference makes constraint.

Constraint shapes possibility.

Possibility opens into becoming.

Becoming changes the relations.

And the new relations make new possibilities.”

She stopped.

The old philosopher waited.

“Then what comes first?” he asked.

She looked at him.

“I don't know.”

He smiled.

“Good.”

She frowned.

“You think that is good?”

“It may be the best answer we have found.”

That evening, the philosophers gathered in the King's hall.

The King listened while the youngest philosopher drew a great circle upon the floor.

At the top she wrote:

RELATION

Then:

DIFFERENCE

Then:

CONSTRAINT

Then:

POSSIBILITY

Then:

BECOMING

Then:

NEW RELATION

And from the last words she drew a line back to the first.

The King studied the circle.

“So this is how the world works?”

“Perhaps,” said the youngest philosopher.

“But where does the circle begin?”

She looked at the line.

“It doesn't seem to.”

The King frowned.

“Every circle must have a beginning.”

“Does it?”

The oldest philosopher laughed softly.

“A wheel has no first point on its rim.”

The King looked again.

“But surely possibility must have been introduced somewhere.”

“By whom?” asked the youngest philosopher.

The King said nothing.

“Perhaps,” she continued, “we have been imagining possibility incorrectly.”

She erased the circle.

The King looked surprised.

Then she drew the country itself.

“The world is not a collection of things,” she said.

“It is a changing organisation of relations.”

She drew the river.

“The river and its banks are not merely two things.”

She drew the bridge.

“What the river and the banks can be for one another changes when the bridge is built.”

She drew the road.

“What the villages can become for one another changes with the road.”

She drew the forest.

“What the forest affords depends upon who enters it.”

Then she drew the Hall of Languages.

“And what can be thought or said changes when new distinctions become available.”

The King was silent.

The youngest philosopher put down the chalk.

“A world has a history not only of what has happened,” she said.

“It also has a history of what could have happened.”

The oldest philosopher nodded.

“And of what can happen now.”

“And what can happen now,” said the youngest philosopher, “depends upon what the world has become.”

The King looked toward the open doors of the hall.

“So the future is not waiting somewhere ahead of us?”

“No.”

“Then where is it?”

She smiled.

“Here.”

The King looked around.

At the floor.

The walls.

The doors.

The people.

The roads beyond the city.

“Here?”

“In the relations already in play.”

The oldest philosopher added:

“The future is not a place the world travels toward.”

He pointed toward the doorway.

“It is what the present makes possible.”

The King thought about this.

“But if possibility depends upon constraint, then constraint closes possibilities.”

“No,” said the youngest philosopher.

“It distinguishes them.”

She walked to the door and opened it.

“The wall keeps us from walking through it.”

She closed the door.

“The door keeps us from entering the garden.”

She opened it again.

“But the very structure that prevents some things makes other things possible.”

She pointed beyond the doorway.

“The path exists because the land has a shape.”

She pointed to the bridge.

“The bridge exists because the river cannot simply be crossed everywhere.”

She pointed to the Hall of Languages.

“Meaning becomes possible because language distinguishes.”

The oldest philosopher smiled.

“Constraint does not close the world.”

He looked toward the night beyond the doors.

“It gives the world a shape in which something new can emerge.”

No one spoke for a while.

Then the child who had once asked where the future lived came forward.

She had grown taller now.

She looked at the great circle on the floor.

“Does it ever end?”

The youngest philosopher looked down at the chalk.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because when something becomes real, the world is different.”

“And then?”

“Then new things become possible.”

“And then?”

“The new possibilities can become real.”

“And then?”

The youngest philosopher smiled.

“Then the relations change again.”

The child considered this.

“So the world keeps making new worlds?”

The oldest philosopher looked at her.

“Perhaps that is what becoming is.”

Outside, the wind moved through the trees.

Somewhere beyond the city, a road was being built.

Somewhere else, a road was disappearing.

A door stood open.

Another was closed.

A seed lay beneath the soil.

A child was growing.

A new word was being spoken for the first time.

A new relation was beginning somewhere, though no one yet knew what it would make possible.

The philosophers returned to the hill.

From there, the First Country looked almost unchanged.

But they knew better now.

The country was not merely what it was.

It was also what its relations allowed it to become.

And those possibilities were not waiting in some invisible kingdom beyond the world.

They were being generated continuously.

Not by imagination alone.

Not by fate.

Not by a catalogue written before the country existed.

But by the changing organisation of the world itself.

The youngest philosopher looked once more across the country.

Then she spoke the words that the philosophers would later carve above the entrance to the Hall of Questions:

A relation is one of the ways in which a world makes a difference to what can become.

Beneath it they carved another sentence:

The world does not contain possibilities.

And beneath that:

The world generates possibilities through its relations.

For a long time, the philosophers thought they had finally reached the answer.

Then the oldest philosopher pointed to the beginning of their inscription.

“Read it again.”

The youngest philosopher did.

A relation makes a difference.

A difference shapes what can happen.

What can happen becomes possible.

What becomes possible may become actual.

What becomes actual changes the relations.

And the new relations make new possibilities.

She looked at the old philosopher.

“The answer leads back to the question.”

“Yes.”

“Then we have gone in a circle.”

The old philosopher shook his head.

“No.”

He pointed toward the road below.

“Look.”

The road was not a circle.

It continued beyond the horizon.

“The circle does not close,” he said.

“It turns.”

And the First Country, which had once seemed to be a collection of things, seemed suddenly to the youngest philosopher like something alive:

not a world containing possibility,

but a world making possibility—

not a world travelling toward a predetermined future,

but a world continually becoming capable of becoming otherwise.

She looked toward the horizon.

And for the first time, she did not ask where the road ended.

She asked:

What might the world become capable of next?

The Country That Changed Its Roads

For many years, the people of the First Country had believed that their country was fixed.

The mountains were where they had always been.

The rivers followed their ancient courses.

The forests grew in their accustomed places.

The roads connected the towns as they always had.

The people changed.

The seasons changed.

Things happened.

But the country itself, they thought, remained.

Then one spring the King ordered a bridge to be built.

The river was wide.

For generations, travellers had crossed it only by taking a road far to the north.

The journey was long and difficult.

Now the builders laid stones across the water.

When the bridge was finished, the people gathered to see what had changed.

They looked at the river.

It was still there.

They looked at the banks.

They had not moved.

They looked at the mountains.

They were unchanged.

They looked at the road.

It was still the same road.

“What has been altered?” asked the King.

The oldest builder pointed towards the bridge.

“The relations.”

The King frowned.

“The river remains.”

“Yes.”

“The banks remain.”

“Yes.”

“The road remains.”

“Yes.”

“Then how has the country changed?”

The builder smiled.

“Walk across.”

The King did.

On the other side he stopped.

The northern road was still there.

But now there was another route.

A journey that had once taken three days could be made in an afternoon.

A village that had been distant had become near.

A market that had rarely been visited became part of ordinary life.

The country had not acquired many new things.

It had acquired new possibilities.

The people were astonished.

But then something stranger happened.

Because the distant village was now accessible, merchants began travelling there.

Because merchants came, the villagers began making things to sell.

Because new goods appeared, people in the King's city began wanting them.

Because people wanted them, new roads were made.

Because new roads were made, other villages became accessible.

And each new possibility opened others.

The bridge had not merely changed a route.

It had changed the field from which further changes could arise.

The philosophers took notice.

“This is not merely change,” they said.

“What is it, then?”

“Evolution.”

The word was unfamiliar.

So they explained.

“Evolution is not simply the appearance of new things.”

“What else could it be?”

“The transformation of what can happen next.”

The people began looking for examples.

They found one in the marshes.

For many generations, certain small creatures had lived at the edge of the water.

Then the waters receded.

New plants grew.

New insects appeared.

The creatures that could live among those plants survived.

Their descendants changed.

The people watched as new forms of life appeared.

But the philosophers pointed to something else.

“The important change is not only in the creatures.”

“What else has changed?”

“The relations between the creatures and their surroundings.”

A new creature lived differently.

It ate different things.

It moved differently.

It became food for something else.

It altered the plants around it.

Its presence changed the conditions in which other creatures lived.

The world had not merely gained a new inhabitant.

The new inhabitant had changed the world in which future inhabitants would have to live.

The people understood.

A new thing could become a new relation.

And a new relation could become a new possibility.

Then the philosophers went to the city.

There they discovered another kind of evolution.

For many years, the people had followed an old custom.

Then one day someone proposed a different way of doing things.

At first it seemed insignificant.

But others adopted it.

Then institutions changed around it.

Then expectations changed.

Then new practices became possible.

The people looked back and realised that the original custom had not merely been replaced.

The relations among the participants had changed.

And because those relations had changed, actions that had once seemed impossible became ordinary.

The philosophers wrote:

A new practice does not merely enter a world. It changes the world of possibilities in which further practices can arise.

Then they discovered something still stranger.

A scholar introduced a new distinction.

Before that day, the people had seen only one kind of thing.

Afterwards, they could distinguish two.

The objects themselves had not changed.

But the way the people could understand them had.

Something that had previously been invisible to thought became visible.

A question that had previously seemed meaningless could now be asked.

A possibility of understanding had appeared.

The philosophers gathered together.

They compared the bridge, the changing creatures, the new custom and the new distinction.

“What do these have in common?”

The youngest philosopher answered:

“In each case, something changed the relations.”

“And then?”

“The possibilities changed.”

“And then?”

“Something became possible that had not previously been possible.”

“And then?”

“That new actuality changed the relations again.”

They drew the sequence upon a great tablet:

Relations

→ possibilities

→ becoming

→ new relations

→ new possibilities.

They looked at it for a long time.

The oldest philosopher spoke.

“We have been thinking about the future incorrectly.”

“How?”

“We imagined a fixed world containing a fixed space of possibilities.”

He pointed to the tablet.

“But the space itself can change.”

The people began to understand that evolution was not necessarily like travellers moving through an already existing country.

It could be more like the country continually changing the roads available to its travellers.

A new bridge.

A new species.

A new custom.

A new concept.

Each could alter the relations that constituted the present.

And each could therefore alter what the future could become.

The King asked:

“Then is the future open?”

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because every present has structure.”

“And yet new things can happen?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Because what becomes actual can change the structure from which the next possibilities arise.”

The King was silent.

He looked towards the bridge.

The bridge had not been there before.

Now it was.

And because it was there, the country was no longer the country it had been.

The people began to see the same pattern everywhere.

The world of a tiny creature was not the world of a human being.

A child inhabited possibilities that would later become unavailable—or unimaginable—in adulthood.

A society could acquire distinctions that transformed what its members could ask.

A species could enter an environment and alter the relations that constituted that environment.

Different participants did not merely occupy different places within one field of possibility.

Their relations constituted different fields of possibility.

The philosophers therefore abandoned an old picture.

They had once imagined possibility as a vast landscape, fixed forever, through which history travelled.

Now they imagined something more extraordinary.

The landscape itself could change.

Roads could appear.

Roads could disappear.

Mountains could become passages.

Passages could become walls.

New distinctions could divide what had previously seemed continuous.

New relations could bring distant things into reach.

And every becoming could alter the country from which the next becoming would arise.

One evening, the youngest philosopher returned to the bridge.

He watched people crossing.

A merchant travelled east.

A child travelled west.

A farmer carried grain.

A traveller followed the road simply because she had never taken it before.

He thought about the river.

Before the bridge, the river had constrained the country.

After the bridge, the relation had changed.

And once the relation changed, the future of the country changed with it.

He suddenly saw the deepest strangeness.

The bridge had not simply made a new journey possible.

The new journey had made new relations possible.

Those relations had made new actions possible.

Those actions had changed the country again.

The future was therefore not merely opened by the present.

It could be transformed by what entered through that opening.

The philosopher took out his book.

He wrote:

Becoming does not merely actualise possibility. Sometimes becoming changes what is possible next.

He looked across the river.

The bridge stood quietly in the evening light.

Nothing about it seemed mysterious.

And yet the philosopher knew that something profound had happened.

The country had acquired a future it had not possessed before.

Not because the future had been hiding somewhere beyond the horizon.

Not because something had arrived from outside the world.

But because the relations of the world had changed.

And so the people began to tell a new story.

They said that the First Country was not a country through which history travelled.

It was a country that changed as history happened.

Every new thing could alter a relation.

Every new relation could open a possibility.

Every new possibility could become actual.

And every new actuality could alter the world from which further possibilities arose.

The country was therefore not merely becoming different.

It was becoming capable of becoming differently.

This was the most astonishing discovery they had yet made.

Possibility itself could evolve.

But then, one night, the oldest philosopher asked the question that silenced the whole Hall of Doors.

“If possibility can change…”

He looked at the great tablet.

“…what made the first change possible?”

No one answered.

For they had learned how possibilities generate new possibilities.

They had learned how becoming transforms the relations of the present.

They had learned how the world can change the field from which its futures arise.

But now they stood before something deeper.

Before bridges.

Before creatures.

Before customs.

Before concepts.

Before any world had begun to change…

Where did possibility itself come from?

The World of Openings

After the people of the First Country had discovered that the future was not a place but an opening in the present, they began to ask a new question.

“An opening for whom?”

At first this seemed a strange question.

An opening was an opening.

A door was a door.

A path was a path.

A branch was a branch.

What difference could the traveller make?

But one morning a bird landed upon a branch.

The branch bent beneath its feet.

The bird settled comfortably.

A mouse came running along the ground.

It looked up at the same branch.

It could not reach it.

The people watched.

“The branch is offering something,” said the youngest philosopher.

“What?”

“Support.”

“To whom?”

The philosopher pointed to the bird.

The people understood.

The branch had not changed.

But what it made possible depended upon who encountered it.

The next day they found a doorway.

A person walked through it.

Then a dog.

Then a child.

Then a horse.

But when a mouse approached, it slipped through a narrow gap beside the threshold instead.

The people laughed.

“The doorway offers passage.”

“Yes.”

“To everyone?”

The philosopher shook his head.

“To those for whom its relation to the world permits passage.”

The people began looking differently at the country.

They had once thought that things simply possessed properties.

A branch was strong.

A wall was solid.

A doorway was open.

A path was long.

Now they began to ask another question:

What does this make possible?

A branch could support a bird.

The same branch could obstruct a larger creature.

A wall could stop a traveller.

The same wall could shelter her from the wind.

A gap could be a doorway for a mouse and no doorway at all for a horse.

A river could obstruct a walker and carry a boat.

The people gave a name to these strange possibilities.

They called them affordances.

At first the word sounded peculiar.

But they soon discovered that it described something they had been overlooking everywhere.

The world was full of things that did not merely exist.

They offered possibilities.

And those possibilities arose neither solely from the things nor solely from those who encountered them.

They arose from the relation between them.

This changed the way the people understood their country.

They stopped drawing maps containing only mountains, rivers, roads and houses.

Instead they began drawing maps of what could be done.

Here, a bird could perch.

Here, a traveller could cross.

Here, a child could hide.

Here, a boat could pass.

Here, a wall could shelter.

Here, a narrow passage could be entered by a mouse but not by a man.

The same landscape contained many countries.

For every creature inhabited a somewhat different field of possibility.

One afternoon the King visited the mapmakers.

“What is the true map of the country?” he asked.

The mapmakers looked at one another.

“There is no single one.”

The King was displeased.

“Then what are all these maps?”

“Maps of different possibilities.”

“Which one is correct?”

“All of them.”

The King frowned.

“How can that be?”

The oldest mapmaker pointed towards the forest.

“The forest is one forest.”

“Yes.”

“But what it affords to a deer is not what it affords to a woodcutter.”

The King looked at the forest.

“And to a bird?”

“Something different again.”

“And to a lost child?”

“Something different again.”

The King was silent.

At last he understood.

A world was not simply the collection of things within it.

It was the field of possibilities those things made available to its participants.

The discovery spread beyond the physical country.

The grammarians began to say:

“A language is not merely a collection of words. It affords distinctions.”

The judges said:

“A law is not merely a collection of rules. It affords some actions and closes others.”

The teachers said:

“A school is not merely a building. It affords ways of learning.”

And the philosophers began to say something even stranger:

“A concept is not merely an idea. It affords questions.”

The people had once thought that concepts simply described the world.

Now they noticed that changing a concept could change what they were able to notice.

There had been a time when no one had asked certain questions because no one had possessed the distinctions with which to formulate them.

Then someone changed the way the people understood something.

Suddenly a distinction appeared.

Something that had always been present became visible.

A possibility of thought had opened.

The people marvelled.

“The thing was there all along.”

“Yes.”

“Then what changed?”

“The relation.”

The old philosopher smiled.

“You have learned the lesson of the doorway.”

The people began experimenting.

They moved a chair from one side of a room to another.

Nothing about the chair changed.

Nothing about the room changed.

Yet suddenly the room offered different possibilities.

The chair could now be sat upon from a different direction.

A passage that had been open was narrowed.

A corner that had been empty became usable.

The people began to realise that a world could change without its things changing very much at all.

The arrangement could change.

And when the arrangement changed, the affordances changed.

And when the affordances changed, the possible futures changed.

Then came a curious incident.

The King had once forbidden people to enter the eastern garden after sunset.

One evening he changed the rule.

Nothing physical was altered.

The gates remained.

The paths remained.

The trees remained.

But that night, for the first time, the garden afforded a new kind of action.

People could enter.

A possibility had appeared without a new object appearing.

The people were beginning to see the deeper pattern.

Relations established differences.

Differences established constraints.

Constraints differentiated futures.

And now they understood that those differentiated futures were not simply abstract possibilities.

They were possibilities available within a world to its participants.

They were affordances.

The world itself had begun to look different.

It was no longer a warehouse of objects.

Nor was it merely a collection of events.

It was a landscape of openings.

Some wide.

Some narrow.

Some visible.

Some hidden.

Some available to one creature but not another.

Some appearing when a door opened.

Some disappearing when a rule changed.

Some emerging when a new concept gave people a way to see what had previously escaped their notice.

The people began calling this landscape the World of Openings.

But then the youngest philosopher asked a disturbing question.

“If affordances depend upon relations, what happens when the relations themselves change?”

The others looked at him.

He continued.

“If the chair moves, the room changes.”

“Yes.”

“If the rule changes, the action changes.”

“Yes.”

“If the concept changes, what can be thought changes.”

“Yes.”

“Then what happens if the relations do not merely change…”

He looked towards the horizon.

“…but evolve?”

No one answered.

For they could already see the consequence.

If the relations changed, the affordances changed.

If the affordances changed, the possibilities changed.

And if the possibilities changed, then the future itself was no longer the same future.

The country would not merely become different.

It would become a country in which different things could become.

The old philosopher walked slowly to the doorway of the Hall.

He placed his hand upon its frame.

For a long moment he said nothing.

Then he turned to the others.

“Perhaps we have been thinking about change too narrowly.”

“How so?”

“We have asked what happens when things change.”

He looked out across the country.

“Perhaps the more important question is what happens when the relations that make possibilities possible begin to change.”

And somewhere beyond the hills, where no map yet reached, the country seemed to open a little further.

The people could not yet see what lay there.

But they understood that something had changed.

Not a thing.

Not a place.

Not yet an event.

A relation.

And with it, the country had acquired new openings.

New affordances.

New futures.

The question that now stood before them was no longer merely:

What can this world become?

It was more unsettling:

What happens when the world itself changes what it affords?

The Country That Had No Future

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?