Practicing the Future

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." - Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)

Human beings have a peculiar habit: long before tomorrow arrives, we begin living there. We start rehearsing conversations that haven't happened yet. We imagine homes we've never entered, that we hope will be ours; dream jobs we've never been offered; and lives we have not yet lived. We picture our children as adults while they're still learning to put their socks on by themselves; we stand in the lines at grocery stores planning vacations years away, and we fall asleep wondering what next summer might look like, because before the future becomes reality, it first becomes imagination.

I realized just how instinctive this is a few weeks ago, when my husband submitted a job application in New York City. Nothing had actually happened. There was no interview, no phone call, no offer, just an application. And yet, before dinner, I had already moved us there. I found myself imagining Saturday mornings wandering through bookstores, getting museum memberships for all of us, the really tiny apartment with impossible rent that I somehow convinced myself we'd make work. I pictured my daughters growing up in a city that never seems to run out of stories, and wondered what it would feel like to apply for doctoral programs nearby. For an hour or two, or more, the future felt strangely familiar. The next morning, I caught myself laughing at how certain I'd already become, how easily I had convinced myself this was set, decided, it was real, but nothing had changed, except that we had already lived there. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this wasn't unusual; it was simply human. History is filled with people practicing futures they could not yet see.

Long before Abraham knew where he was going, he left home believing there was somewhere worth going. He spent the rest of his life walking toward a promise he never fully saw fulfilled. His descendants carried it further still, through Egypt, through the wilderness, through forty years of a destination that existed mostly as memory and promise. The Promised Land became less a place on a map than a place they held in their imagination long enough to keep walking. Long before ships crossed the Atlantic, families had already lived in the country on the other side of it. They had pictured the harbor, the language they didn't yet speak, the version of themselves who would arrive changed. Some of those imagined lives came true. Others didn't survive the crossing at all. But the imagining came first, every time, before the ship, before the ocean, before anyone knew how the story would end. Every future is imagined before it is lived. Perhaps history is not only the story of what happened. It could also be the story of what people believed was about to happen.

I've wondered why we do this, why we're so incapable of leaving tomorrow alone. Maybe uncertainty is too uncomfortable. The present asks very little of our imagination; we can see it, touch it, measure it. The future asks everything of it. So we rehearse. We picture the interview before we've been invited, imagine retirement decades before we stop working, and write conversations that may never take place. Sometimes we call it planning, or daydreaming. Sometimes we even call it worrying. The line between them is thinner than we'd like to admit.

If I'm being honest, I've always lived a little ahead of myself. Part of that is simply who I am, and part of it is undoubtedly shaped by anxiety; my mind has always preferred to prepare for possibilities before they arrive, as though rehearsing enough versions of tomorrow might somehow make uncertainty easier to carry. Of course, it never really works that way. Life has a habit of ignoring the script: the job doesn't come through, the move never happens, the conversation unfolds differently than we imagined or doesn’t happen at all. History itself reminds us that human beings are remarkably poor fortune tellers. When empires were expected to last forever, and wars expected to end by Christmas but stretched into years instead. When economic booms suddenly collapsed and our carefully laid plans unraveled. The map we plan was never the territory.

Yet I can't convince myself that practicing the future is entirely a mistake. After all, hope requires imagination. If no one had imagined a different world, there would have been no movements for justice; if no one had imagined flight, there would have been no airplanes; if no one had imagined crossing oceans, there would have been no voyages. Every meaningful thing humanity has ever built existed first in someone's mind, and hope is impossible without imagination. Perhaps that's the paradox: the same imagination that allows us to build tomorrow can also tempt us to live there before we arrive.

That may be why the image of a map keeps returning to me. A map is, in many ways, an act of faith: it assumes a destination exists before you've reached it, and it gives direction without guaranteeing the journey. Sometimes the map is accurate. Sometimes the road changes, or you discover that the place you were meant to go wasn't the place you originally circled. But no journey begins without someone first unfolding a map. The human imagination may work the same way; we draw maps to futures we cannot yet see, not because we know exactly where they lead, but because without them, we'd never begin walking.

We never moved to New York. The job never came through; there was no offer, no second interview, just a long silence that eventually answered the question on its own. The bookstores, the museum memberships, the tiny apartment we would have somehow made work, none of it became real. Instead, it became another story we tell ourselves about a life that almost was. And yet I don't think the imagining was wasted.

I've begun to suspect that hope has never depended on certainty. In fact, it may depend on the opposite. Hope exists because the future is uncertain, not despite it, and even a future that never arrives can still teach us something about what we're capable of wanting.

Tomorrow morning, somewhere in the world, someone will submit an application. Someone will pack a suitcase. Someone will begin writing a novel. Someone will name a child after someone they lost. Someone will plant a tree whose shade they will never sit beneath. Someone will whisper a prayer. Long before any of those futures become reality, they will already exist in someone's imagination.

Perhaps that is one of the oldest things about being human: we cannot see tomorrow, and yet somehow, we keep walking toward it.