Captain Future's Log

Inside the Future

The relationship of inner and outer, of physical/spatial/temporal with mind/heart/spirit/soul, is a major area of exploration for those who look towards the evolution of human understanding that might help us make our way into the future.

The whole idea of "dreaming up" is about that relationship, as dreams are related to waking reality. In many ways, the hard distinction between imagination and reality, between thought and the physical, is being understood as functioning in more and more bounded, limited areas. In most of our universe, the relationship is much more important, and there are perhaps ultimate ways in which they blend together and become the same. What's out there and what's in here move towards equivalence, perhaps identity.

This particular corner of cyberspace has been largely concerned so far with the "outer" constitutents of the future, and the "objective" areas. That's shortchanging at least half of the future, and perhaps a larger proportion of what will shape the future.

So reader beware: it's going to get a bit more "inner," subjective and even personal around here. Not exclusively, of course, but more perhaps than before. Coming from a storytelling galaxy, I've long recognized as well the apparent paradox of the general springing from the specific, the universal from the subjective, the personal.

For example, this personal observation...

Jung was the one who first devised the introvert/extravert distinction. For him, extravert did not mean primarily a kind of paradigmatic party animal, a person who liked being around lots of people, though many extraverts do. The difference between introvert and extravert had to do where each get their energy, and where they get their direction. The extravert gets energy from others, as well as values and beliefs from others. The introvert gets energy from inside (which often but not always means solitude and quiet), and values and beliefs from inside themselves, from internal processes.

Jung also speculated that people tend to flip to the opposite tendency past middle age: extraverts become more introverted, introverts more extraverted. It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I'm a lifelong introvert. That's where I get my energy primarily, and my focus. If there's been any sort of flip, I've recently wondered if it isn't in seeking more validation and cues from exterior sources, for instance in my work.

Though to have any sort of career a writer needs readers or at least patrons, and to communicate, an audience. And insofar as we are show people, applause is also energizing. But when I was younger, it seems to me I took my primary direction from internal beliefs in the rightness of what I meant to do, and was meant to do. Not getting the responses and opportunities I wanted could be profoundly depressing, but I don't think I ever lost that orientation, even when it became an anxiety, at least not for a long time. That was part of the future I believed in---my part.

I still believe I know my business on the basic level of words and sentences, paragraphs and pieces. I know at least what they are about, their combination of sense and rhythm, and the equal importance of information and music in them. I've got a lot of experience, and I trusted my educated instincts. But in the sense of what I'm meant to do, I've probably ceded more and more to external influences---mostly in the sense of what I should not bother trying to do anymore. I know that aspects of that future I envisioned for myself will not happen, and not in the way I envisioned them.

There are a lot of reevaluations that are proper at my age, and I'm sure I'll be writing about them here, or somewhere nearby, in the coming weeks, as I come closer to a landmark birthday. But while I am perhaps ready to leave expectations and certain ambitions behind, I do feel I've let this listening to external voices (especially when they are silently disapproving) go a little too far. I intend to get back to listening to those old (and perhaps by now somewhat wiser) internal voices more. After all, who knows how much longer they'll be talking to anybody? At least one of us ought to listen, and I guess that's me.

And as I finish this observation I get a profound sense of deja vu. Have I said all this before? Time is a complicated, even an elusive, thing. That much does become clearer, as it goes by.