Still Life #17: Throwing Possibilities into the Future

“Existence precedes essence” said #Sartre . We are born into the world, void, and are gradually impregnated by our experience of it. As Stephen Batchelor puts it “we are thrown into existence and its possibilities are thrust upon us”.

This morning Sam created his own Easter Egg hunt. Put his jersey on backwards so that the hoodie covered his face and enthusiastically tossed chocolate eggs into the shrubs so that he could later find them. The author of his own fantasies, recreating for himself a childhood familiarity.

This is the place where we continuously find ourselves in every given moment: our pasts shaping the possibilities we imagine for our futures. “We constantly are confronted with a future that irretrievably plunges to the past, “ Batchelor suggests, “but in doing so demands that we firmly seize it in the present moment and project our possibilities into actuality.”

Today Sam decided to find some respite by making the Easter Bunny real again, even if by his own conscious design.

What about your past is informing how you imagine your future? How might your past enrich or limit this imagination? What if we tried to leave the past behind and allowed ourselves to be entirely shaped by the present?

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Still Life #16: Exposing an Imagined and Unreal World
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Still Life #18: Being, in the World

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