The future is the context for the present moment. First consider that past, present, future are nothing more that linguist abstractions. That is to say they only exist in language. Without language they would not exist. However we do not live consistent with that on a day to day basis at all. We live as thought there is a future and certain things are going to happen and we have plans for them or dreams or maybe we have given-up-on them or are hopeful about. Anyway for human beings we live into the future and there is some future there.
See if you can verify this for yourself. When some great vacation is just next week, we hardly care what work gets piled on. Just before a wedding the participants are ecstatic (most of them most of the time) even though any survey of long wedded couples testify there are trying times ahead, it matters not. That Plato said: “Love is a grave mental disease”, matters not. The future they (we) are living into is the context for the present, shaping and coloring it. In this case with excitement, joy, happiness, anticipation of unending attention, devotion, and love forever.
If we can get out hands on the levers and dials of creating futures, and we can, we can create any way of being and acting in the present. One thing we know already is that it happens in language. And we have access to language. However it will take something more that just a casual relationship with language (our word). We will need to deal with: WHO ARE YOU?
The material on this page is a thread that runs through the entire Being A Leader course takes an investment in time for us to be able to discover it for ourselves. You are invited to participate.
Reference
Erhard, Werner and Jensen, Michael C. and Zaffron, Steve and Echeverria, Jeronima, Course Materials for: ‘Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model’ (October 4, 2022). Harvard Business School NOM Working Paper No. 09-038, Simon School Working Paper No. 08-03, Barbados Group Working Paper No. 08-02, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1263835 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1263835