Future perfect distance

I took a personal day yesterday. My last one of the academic year which ends at a point million years from now: June 3. Or perhaps slightly earlier, which, by the time you arrive at the end of this post, to the logic of which, you will have become privy.

The future is perfect

My first poetry collection (not published, just named) was titled “Future Perfect Distance.” An undergraduate title, but a reflection of a sensation I love: looking forward and back at the same time and seeing everything in between as yet to come and also as completed. In English, the future perfect tense allows us to look to an event in the future (the end of the semester) and reflect on what will have passed once we arrive there: by June 3, I will have figured this all out.

In some shamanic traditions, the future waits behind the body because we cannot see it; the past sits in front of us because we can. What we can see is set; what we cannot see is in motion.

Perhaps I like the idea that there is a malleable, figureable-outable future. That all I have to do is pass the time between now and then and then the time, and it’s inherent challenges, will have passed. Get it?

I believed this a couple of years ago when I had my hip replaced. I remember on the morning of the surgery thinking that all I had to do was show up, go to sleep, and wake up and it would all be over. I should have defined “it” better.

The surgery was over, but the healing and residual trauma in my body is still, still working itself out. But “it” is getting there….

The future is now—now!

Today is June 5. I wrote the first part of this blog almost a month ago, and now I am back to finish it. Grades are submitted. The automated out-of-office message is on. My work computer and school bag are tucked away in a corner of a corner behind a corner where I can pretend they don’t exist for a couple of months.

So, what was the logic of May 10 to which I planned to make you privy by June 3rd—or 5th? I don’t know. Other than to say that, in the business of me, the future behind me is now a past before me about which I will have already known.