Apple in the Jam

I like the ancients - and finding out about how the ancients lived, thought and perceived the world. But I am also always thinking of the future - trying to understand what it is we are running/moving towards. Because I believe deep down that is where the meaning of our existence comes from, the purpose of our being. For example, I don't believe we are here to perpetuate the past - to be a re-enactment of what has been. And the choices we have to make are all to do with the future. But what do we mean by the future, what exactly is the future?

Last night I said to a friend that all we do is backward-looking. We project what we have learned from our parents, teachers, colleagues, friends, world media around us and reflect back the tastes, opinions and (above all) desires we have taken from them. So in a way our choices and dreams are necessarily born out of those influences from the past and therefore of the past. But the future is something other than the past and if we are to experience and understand the true meaning and nature of our future, surely we must be able to divorce this from our past to some degree.  It is like wishing to taste the apple on its own without the interference of the sugar in a jam. Or at least to recognize that part of the jam that comes from the apple and not just assume the jam itself is what the apple tastes like. The reality of our future must be jam, there can be no future without an admixture of the past, but do we really understand the meaning and potential of the future itself, the apple as a thing separate in birth from the reality of our past?

So why is all this important? Maybe some of the crazy decisions and ideas we see proliferating in our world nowadays are driven by a lack of recognition of the extent to which we are taking the past with us and a failure to understand what that means in terms of the future. Maybe the lesson to be learnt is not just from the past but from understanding the relationship of this past to the future that is to come.