Catching Idle Butterflies

The future will be

Saturday I took a nostalgic movie trip and watched Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country.

The title and premise of the film was based on “the undiscovered country” being analogous to the future (and apparently a line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet [Act 1, Scene 4 according to the movie]). For some of the characters, the idea of change, or peace between two races was so terrifying, they were willing to start a war over it.

I kept thinking about this line and how appropriate it is to call the future the undiscovered country. Thinking like an explorer or pioneer, the idea of going to a place we’ve never been is full of excitement and fear. It’s the unknown, but an unknown we can never turn away from as much as we may want to. The future moves without our consent, and we must face it when it becomes today. It’s also something we have less control over than we sometimes like to think.

Yet, though we sometimes fear the future, it also excites us, because it’s in the future our dreams reside. Think of the pioneers who came across the pond to a New World with little inkling of what awaited them. Yet they uprooted their family, sometimes even leaving them behind, with little by way of wealth, and for what? For a mere dream of freedom, of the possibility of gaining land, and monetary success. Failure was a small consideration at that point, if at all.

Still thinking of my 400th entry with a scant 100 to go (99 now), I considered what to name my new blog.

At this point, I’ll likely call it The Undiscovered Country, subtitled: My journey into the Future.

Do I have the courage of the pioneer and explorer? Not really, but I don’t have much choice, do I?

The future will be.

I have no point today beyond that. Nothing much is going on except work (I did get a new chair, though! Whoopee! Hopefully my butt won’t hurt no more. I wore out the cushion on my old one ). I want to have a blue January, and this is all I could come up with.