the Abundance of Youth

does this hold in old age?

"The Voyage of Life: Youth" Thomas Cole (1842)

I want to share my most enduring, vital solace—my belief in the abundance of the future.

"Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future."
– Brian Eno

What do I mean by abundance?

To me, it means that the future holds all promises, that Fate has yet to play its entire hand. If I’m an explorer, searching for El Dorado and Atlantis and Shangri La, then I’m a delusional one, because I know that Some Day, I will find them.

I trust in Tomorrow.

I trust that behind that curtain lies success, reward, glory, treasure, passion, and love—all manners of blessings that dot the distant sky of tomorrow like stars overhead. I chase that effulgent sunrise even as its radiance washes out the constellations from visible sight.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
—Steve Jobs

I march on and, sometimes, my path forks; two roads diverge in a yellow wood and I am faced with a decision to choose but one. They may rejoin just a few hundred feet later, or they may take me to different lands entirely, I cannot know and yet I must choose, but which one?

Well, life is an endless garden of forking paths, and we are pachinko balls, falling, bouncing endlessly, while a million coin flips carry us to our final destination. You can know where you are going without knowing how you are going to get there. So, I take the road less travelled and I try to not look back—my faith in the abundant future gives me courage to do this.

I believe that further down my path lies the elusive second chance, and yes! I can scarcely believe it, but it’s true, the third and fourth chance are there too. In fact, all chances are dancing beyond the horizon, just out of sight, so I shouldn’t beat myself up for making a mistake.

There's also no need to fret, worry and wait for the perfect time to start something, anything. I can just begin now. And then, I can begin again, because I've learned so much from the first time around, and because there are always more people who I haven't reached, more ground I haven't covered, more ways I haven't tried.

The world and its people are so vast and diverse so as to be effectively inexhaustible. I'm know I’m not going to deplete this cornucopia so I try, fall down and get up again; I learn and grow and trust that is enough.

"In a year from now, you will regret not having started today."
—Karen Lamb

I believe that the land of the Future is always raining and opportunity falls from the sky like raindrops in a ceaseless deluge. There, it has rained for thousands of years on rich and poor alike; there, the rain will fill my cup again.

And that same rain will fill the harbor and the rising tide will lift all the boats. Trusting in this abundance allows me to let go of scarcity, and its hollow promise of safety, to try playing a positive-sum game with the world.

Meanwhile, internally, this mindset clears away certain kinds of fear and makes space for generosity, boldness, collaboration, and agency to bloom, and that is a life more worth living.

When I believe in the abundance of the future, I am more easily able to let go of my past and look forward. I know that Life and Luck can be fickle mistresses, sometimes cruel, sometimes capricious. It can feel like the universe is ultimately indifferent to our existence.

But this indifference also means that life is endlessly forgiving. It remembers no wrong and bears no grudge against me, a fresh start is mine as soon as I claim it. Indeed, the past does not shackle me unless I choose to carry its weight.

“Let go, or be dragged.”
—Zen proverb

In terms of relationships, it means knowing that I share this planet with an unfathomably diverse range of people: some spurn me, some ignore me, some love me. No man is an island and on this Pangaea, you can find anybody.

It's like the old aphorism "there are plenty of fish in the sea” but applied to the opportunities of life in a general way: I cast a wide net and filter finely because I can always afford to move on.

To me, this diversity is the ultimate form of abundance because it promises connection no matter how niche or esoteric I, my idea, or my life is. I'd be hard pressed to find a part of me which I share with not a single other soul in this world.

So, this diversity liberates me from dependence on any single person's acceptance and it's hard to overstate how beneficial this is for both the relationships I build, and even more crucially, for the relationships I choose to walk away from.

“To suffer before it is necessary is to suffer more than is necessary.”
—Seneca

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
—Mark Twain

When I find myself in the sort of thought spiral that is all about prematurely forecasting doom, the one consistent way out is to remind myself that I can choose how I interpret uncertainty.

Remembering that the possibilities in the future are diverse beyond imagination helps me to see uncertainty as something to embrace rather than to calculate away like an ill-fated Chess grandmaster, for this puzzle has no calculable solution. Instead, I reorient towards curiosity and appreciating the journey.

Finally, simply trusting that everything yet remains and what remains is everything is what frees me up to just be present. This is how I live in alignment with the amor fati of the Stoics, carpe diem, and memento mori, not to disregard the future and treat it with wanton recklessness and disdain, but rather to make choices here and now without fear.

After all, I can hear Abundance whispering:

"The best is yet to come!"
—The Future