Letter To The Future

Dear Future,

It is often hard to see what it is you hold in store for me when I find myself resolute to seek you out more clearly. Oftentimes I devise grandiose dreams of achievement in the various forms of interest I encompass at the particular times in my life. But, as it is almost always the end result, I find myself more and more confused with the coming days and more I learn. Many different great and achieved men of the past have come up with their particular solutions for your purpose. It was just yesterday I read how Mr. Ralf Waldo Emerson stated in Self-Reliance that all things of the past are irrelevant and that to trust yourself and yourself alone is the only way to go about living. Of course, due to the fact that I cannot correctly dictate his words verbatim you receive a vague statement of his ideas from me. Blaise Pascal, another former interest of mine, states that man is nothing without his humble sumbission to God and Christianity. Pascal says, "We almost never think of the present, and if we do it is simply to shed some light on the future. The present is never our end. Past and present are our means, only the future is our end. And so we never actually live, though we hope to, and in constantly striving for happiness it is inevitable that we will never achieve it." He is a great man, but at the end of the day he and I differ in our beliefs. Mr. Emerson too, I hold in great respect for his insight. He does put an awful lot of stock into the youth of every generation. Many others tell me things, also. Kafka, for instance; that great and wonderous German vagabond of the conscientious thought says to me, "We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us posesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether on fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit."

I understand these things well, dear Future, but all the same they seem to confuse my sense of reality all the more. These are men who have lived very trialsome, arduous lives and documented their experiences along the way. Blaise Pascal felt so necessarily bound by his questions that he spent his life in seclusion rendering his visions, and dying too soon the summarize them into a concise manner, leaving us Pensees. I don't wish to be that way.

I think that my greatest problem is that I am far too anylitical of myself moment to moment. I feel that it is using up so much of my creative, spiritual, and intellectual energy that I am drained of any progress in other engagements I find myself a part of. Perhaps the greatest promise of the future is that it holds absolutely no promise, not even for life itself. My will is my destiny. I believe that among other things.

I used to believe I was such a scattered individual. I thought that I could never pick one thing and stick to it with all my might. I know better now. I know that I need not pick any one thing, but all things, if I wish. There is much that I love of this existence, this nature, this humanity, this little spec of stardust in the universe. An upright idividual would simply choose all, and expiate all with the light and truth and love of one's own passionate virtue.

O Future! What more can I ask of you but to contain me? Nothing, I think. If love there, I shall arrive. If great success in work and life be there, I shall not notice. I shall simply acknowledge my existence and ambition for that which I am aroused by, and propell myself onward in the directions of those things until I have reached that absolute furthest points of both satisfaction and possibility. I am C. A. Dominick. Poet, Musician, Painter, Wanderer, Dreamer, Astronomer, Philosopher, Lover, Fighter, Soldier, Teacher, and child of Nature. I am many more. I can build if I so wish and I can destruct whatever house of brick or establishement of thought I so wish. I will tear down all ways of conventional thinking if the task is asked of me from my own trusted will and conscience.

To you, Future, I send my regards. As the custom goes, I will forever be headed your way, never quite reaching you until at last I perish. What I leave behind is for someone else to understand. I forever ride your coattails in the wings of Destiny and find my feet trodding the soil of all my loved pursuances.

Sincerely and humbly yours,

Charles Anthony Dominick