Have you ever looked at your kindergarten class photo, and wondered what all your little classmates are doing now, grown up as you are? They are all doing something. At this very moment, each of them is engaged in one activity or another. And as you look at each of their tiny faces on the paper in front of you, it is almost with a sense of clairvoyance. There you are, in the picture, with your teeth all a-scramble, grinning out at the you of the present moment. Did you know who you were smiling at back then? And as you think about the things you’ve done over the course of the day, the week, the last few years, you realize that your past right now is the little you’s future, and you are seeing it! You know it’s the same story with each one of the beings who were present at school on that day, too. This one is in med school now, that one works at Costco. You’re still best friends with that other one, but she’s been drinking too much lately. You can see everyone’s future and everyone’s past and you feel omnipotent.
Now look at a group of live kindergarteners, standing in front of you, shrieking, touching each other, staring into space. It is easy to conjure the same omniscience you felt when looking at that 20-year-old photograph. Is there a concert pianist standing in front of me? Which one will be a drug addict? These questions seem answerable, tangible, because you yourself were in kindergarden once, and now you are grown. Your future (which is now your present) seems to have revealed itself to you, seems always to have existed as it does now. Sometimes it even feels like it had been there waiting for you, and you walked into it, as you would walk into a room. So you wonder, What awaits these children? And you think, this is something it is possible to know, even if you yourself may lack the clarity of perception required for such knowledge. But it is not possible. Nothing awaits these children. There are no tasks they must complete, no lessons set for them to learn or people born for them to fall in love with. There is simply life, which is created completely new at every moment. It spills out into time like plumes of dye into clear water, with no path or sluice or aim. It is not only that the future cannot be known, but that it does not exist.
