On Prospective Writing
To plan for tomorrow is to commit to a hope. It assumes the affordance of said plan to completion and expresses faith, usually unconsciously, that tomorrow will come at all. The mind steps toward a future that does not yet exist and behaves as though it can be shaped. This act, like writing a task list or marking a date on a calendar, is completely presumptuous.
In shows, perhaps even from experience, you see drawings made by grade school children with a proposed profession. Fire trucks, white coats, crowns on astronauts or race car drivers. I remembered this because I am sure I once did the same. Knowing myself, my drawing was likely a poor markup of a scientist or a businessman. Either that or some landscape with a stickman in a lawn chair. Adults (and increasingly me, as a new adult) laugh because the children speak with conviction. We smile because we know how far life can drift from early intentions.
The stakes of planning rose, and continue to rise, later in life. The sketches evolved into awkward conversations with family, evolved into admission essays, evolved into grant proposals. The questions that adults had posed in seeming jest were now carrying legitimate repercussions. Interestingly enough, during my application for undergraduate study, the prompts regarding my future were the heaviest, as were my answers to them. Tomorrow is a subject I often ponder on, and one that I have become increasingly familiar with over the years. What I wanted to do. Who I hoped to become. These were matters I knew very well but had yet to put to paper. Articulating them gave structure, and in a sense, printing these plans gave them substance and reality, similar to how written documentation is heftier in significance.
That moment revealed prospective writing as not only a tool for persuading others, but one for persuasion of self. Writing your intentions clearly, you feel a spark of possibility; you can almost taste the tomorrow that you just wrote down as the mind reads its own words and takes them as a promise. In describing a path to tomorrow, you create one, even if only faintly, and you begin to follow it. Prospective writing is powerful because it allows you to connect with the part of yourself that still believes in that possibility. This brings me back to the children, whose drawings show the naturalness of this impulse. Devoid of analysis or justification, they simply imagine. Their future is drawn with crayons, and ours, typed, outlined, edited, refined, questioned. In a way, this is knowingly applying that childlike naivety within the confines of our experienced heuristics of the workings of the world. A projection of self into a time that has not yet unfolded.
In placing words on a page, you offer a small promise to the person you hope to become. So, to write about tomorrow is to speak to yourself across time. It is to reach forward, consider possibilities, grasp one, and pull your hand back. Life will likely alter that course but the act remains worthwhile. You learn what you desire, you understand how you imagine yourself, and all the more, you practice hope.