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The future teases us when we desire its secrets. When we are eager to accept whatever gifts it may bring, it crawls toward us, sometimes making generations of humanity wait on the arrivals platform to see who, or what, emerges. For some of us, the future rushes in when we pray for a delay of its inevitable arrival, freighted, we fear, with truths destined to crush our hearts. It approaches, and we feel it, and watch it form and become the present. And then, just when we think we have it in hand, ready to do our bidding, or having done its worst, fissures form, it cracks apart, and fades into the mists of an imperfectly remembered past.

Moving forward, we follow the arrow of time in a constant grasping of trapeze bars fashioned out of our choices, one after the other. The trick is to keep up the pace, to achieve just the right momentum to arrive at the next bar as it swings toward you. Lose that momentum, and you lose the rhythm; the next bar comes then goes without you, your pendulum’s arc diminishing with each missed opportunity…slowing down until you hang motionless…and the cords of time, unable to support your dangling weight, begin to fray and fail. Maybe a trapeze from the future comes your way as a gift from someone who cares.

You reach out and feel the breeze of it; you can see the grain of the wood; you can smell its chalk-dusted grip…but it is beyond your fingertips and you watch helplessly as it falls away, shuttling back toward a…