At any given time in the future, it will be just like now. My body will be where it is, in some specific activity, giving its weight to some specific surface (a piece of furniture, or directly to the ground), my body parts moving about in some busy-ness, attending to their immediate environment. My life will appear as it does now, since all moments in time share the same physical qualities. And, I will most surely be mentally absorbed with some story of my then future, not realizing that at that point in time I am in the future of this past moment here, right now.
It is the physical groundedness in this future reality that fascinates me because of the way we perceive futures, and ourselves in them. While daydreaming in my usual consumption of cerebral images, I picture myself as I appear in my mind, which has a certain type of floating quality, me up there, out there, alone or with others, in imagined scenarios of future actions which directly correspond to my current worries and desires. However, what is striking about this phenomenon is that our way of thinking about the future never includes the physical groundedness (the inescapable demand of gravity) that present moment conditions mandate. It never puts us into a physical reality.
But, of course, all my future doings will possess the same natural requirements of any present moment. I will be a whole body, physically grounded somewhere in space, engaged in some simple activity, body parts moving in their interactions with their immediate surroundings. And, that future action (occurring at that point in time) will have gracefully emerged from the one prior to it, and so on back in time, flowing continually out of what I am physically doing right now, and beyond into my infinite history.
Jill Eng 