Knowing the Future

If you could pay to know the future, would you? No, I'm not talking about paying a palm reader to hold your hand and give you vague references to very generic life events. I'm not talking about listening to an astrologist predict your future by looking at the positioning of the stars and reading you a horoscope. I mean if there was a machine that could see into your future and show you exactly how your life was going to end up, would you take it? Or even better, if you could have a vision from God. Imagine a scenario where you knew that the future that was being shown to you was going to happen. Would the fact that you knew how your life was going to turn out ruin all of your experiences for you; would it be disconcerting or relieving?

What if you not only knew it, what If you knew that you could change it. If you saw something that you didn't like in your future, how would you go about changing it? Everything that happens has a huge effect on the future, so you could be, while trying to avoid a certain fate, hastening the future that you are trying to avoid. There are always the stories of those people in great power receiving a prophecy that their doom would be hastened by a certain person, so they go out of their way to try and eliminate this person, but by doing so turn the person against them, or put them in a situation that they might not had been in had they not taken the steps that they did. Oedipus. Harry Potter. A bunch more that I can't think of right now.

And what if you saw a future that you did want? Would you try to make that future come out like you had seen, or would you sit back, assuming that even through a lack of action, what you saw would still come to pass? What if the future that you saw was a future that you had to make happen, and inaction would cause it to disappear?

What if you saw a future that wasn't necessarily bad, but you thought that you could have a better one. Would you settle for a good to mediocre future, or take the chance for an amazing future, that also might fail horribly and leave you poor, alone, and wondering what went wrong?

People are often so concerned with getting things to "turn out right" that they forget to look around. They forget to stop and smell the roses.

Maybe that big black blurry thing called the future isn't really so important after all. Maybe the journey really is more important than the destination.