Lately my life has been one of parallelisms, funhouse reflections of decades past soaked in the shadow of memory. I find myself in an uncanny valley of repetition, in a hall of cracked mirrors, involuntarily engaged in a project of distorted reclamation of an idyllic past.

As some of you may know, I have been having some trouble with my left knee. Trouble might be underselling it. My joint is disintegrating and I may need to have reconstructive surgery on the joint. So, another joint problem on the same leg where I had to have my hip rebuilt some twenty years ago. As Mark Twain apocryphally said: history never repeats itself but it rhymes.

In another major life event and again as some of you may know, my family is moving back to New York. I am glad to be going back, I love New York. When my family left, I was disconsolate. My mother, in an attempt to comfort my sister and I offered a prediction, a premonition perhaps. She told us that she knew that one day we would return. Prodded on when she said, though it may seem like an eternity to you right now I bet we’ll be back in twenty years. That was September of 2003. Like I said, dear reader, uncanny.

My mother, however, did not write herself out of the return. Though she seems to have foreseen our return to New York with eerie certainty she, at least in my imaging, was always in the picture. As I said, it this is a project of distorted reclamation. We are returning to New York but it is a different we than what we were and what I would like.

Forgive my gloom, dear reader, but as Rosh Hashaná and Yom Kippur approach it is easy to slip in to rituals of reflection. It is easy to curse the angles and feel Sartre’s nausea. It is easy to become angry, embittered even, with the idea that fates are sealed and deaths written in stone as we wear white and dance hand-in-hand with both death and elation. It is something I grapple with in my belief. It has also given me cause and pause to reflect on the future, on certainty, uncertainty, fate, and prophesy.

These reflections have been made all the more poignant by the passing of a dear friend, Alan Weisbard. I had the extraordinary good fortune of learning, laughing, arguing, and exploring with Alan in my time as an undergraduate on domestic exchange at the university of Wisconsin Madison, and feel great privilege for having been able to count him as a mentor, a teacher, and a friend. In addition to being kinds, generous, and razor-sharp, Alan had a sense of assuredness about the future. That is not to say he was some sort of cave-dwelling oracle, had invented a time warp, or possessed a functional crystal ball. No, rather, he had the extraordinary capacity to project a sense of self forward into time, the acumen to understand his significant talents, grace to recognize his limitations, and the richness of spirit to engage fully with all aspects of life he most cherished. Put another way, I admired Alan because he lived fully, optimally even, without the need for continuous expansion not the risk of stagnation. He left nothing on the table. He was, I have come to understand, self-actualized.

Part of his, and I believe any, self-actualization was the capacity I previously extoled to project stability of self into the future. As I have reflected these past weeks I have become increasingly concerned by the growing complexity of that undertaking.

For much of human history up to and including the 20^th century it has been possible to predict a range of possible futures with reasonable certainty. Generally speaking, those futures were bright and optimistic (if coal powered). Walt Disney imaged Spaceship Earth for us, an interconnected tomorrow of growth, tolerance, and shared progress.  Of course, the entire spectrum wasn’t rosy.  It was also conceivable to imagine war, famine, and catastrophic mismanagement. However, those disasters tended to be lower frequency projections and in any case were thigs that would happen in the ever-elusive elsewhere, especially from the Western perspective.

This is no longer the case. Projections of pestilence permeate popular discourse—these are no longer confined to elsewhere. The West is front and center of climate disasters, political instability, stagnating growth, and intellectual exhaustion. Further, technological advances, greenhouse gas accumulation, social stratification, and the pace of life has accelerated. That acceleration has brought complexity, contingency, and, far from the shared future Disney imagined, the interconnectedness of the drowning man, tangled in fishing line, dragging down all those unfortunate enough to swim within his grasp. The cone of probability—from climate hellscape to techno-utopia— is too wide to assimilate any feelings or rational analysis. Both are blocked by the sheer range of possibilities.

The complexity of this task may seem to preclude projecting a stable and manageable range of future outcomes but it does not diminish the necessity of doing so. In order to navigate toward self-actualization we need some rage of latitude to aim for. We need to be able to envision some future. We must recognize the potential for empowerment in the ability to predict our immediate futures. It allows us to make plans, to progress to prepare for and better navigate life’s ups and downs. Having some stable notion of what the future will look like allows us to commit to people, places, and careers.

On the other side of the coin, having no clear sense of one’s immediate future is crippling.  When you can’t move forward you end up moving back, or at the very least stagnating and falling behind.

The effects of poverty illustrate this idea perfectly. Poverty cripples long term planning and decision making, it injects instability into every facet of the sort and long term, it reduces future orientation though stress and resource scarcity. It cripples through dis-induction, the disabling of one’s sense of future.

To draw on an example from my own life (this is  after all my blog, dear reader), the uncertainty surrounding my knee has felt almost as crippling as the injury itself. It has left me wracked with guilt about having חטא, having missed the mark, due to my inability to travel, on two personal promises I made to Alan before his death. It has also left me in feeling like the scapegoat, like a freak among freaks, cast out into Azazel, into the wilderness. Fundamentally, this is because nobody can offer me a clear answer. My physiatrist for whom I have enormous trust and respect seems to think I am in something of a catch-22. By all rights my knee should be dislocated and require surgery but diagnostic imaging doesn’t appear to indicate that that is the case. So, in principle, I need to strengthen the muscles surrounding my knee. However, the exercises that would permit me to do so risk further damaging the knee. You’ll understand my fury at the ever-widening cone of uncertainty about, among other things, the timeframe for my return to Cambridge.

This example is but one of handfuls of events monumental and miniscule that have made my life a whirlwind over the past several weeks. All of these events have further convinced me that if we as individuals, institutions, or societies hope to find actualization we must first find a stable sense of future on which reach the delicate equilibrium non-growth and non-stagnation.

This requires insight, and clarity of a kind that is increasingly rare. I do not however, believe that clarity is impossible. Moments of seeming clairvoyance like the one my mother had 20 years to the month ago demonstrate as much. The question is: in the face of remembering 9/11 and all those who died in the pandemic and all the thousands of forms of death shroud that await us, how do we get those moments of insight that transcend time to be more than flukes, how do we harness them so that we can more effectively integrate our own fears so they don’t hold us back so much, so that we can hope with greater vitality?