Give up your future

Today I can see my future, and count my returns. Believe me, it is not much to give up. Much more people earn much more than I, much more people are much more powerful than I, and much more people get much more respect than I. These people never studied hard, never followed good examples, and always picked up bad habits along the way. Now I am told that man can only try, but it is God who decides who gets what. I have grown up to find that the totem pole of everything I was told stands upside down.

Which is fine. Once burned is twice warned. So I am asking you to give up the future. I am not asking you not to save money, work hard, or plan for the future. Yesterday's present is today's past, and tomorrow's past is today's future. But just don't get hung up on the future, and don't worry about a stitch in time. It does not matter if you do not save nine. Tomorrow comes back, so does the future. If you were not at the right place at the right time with the right person, it was not your turn.

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

A French sculptress named Anilore Banon has created a sculpture on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, which rises out of the waves at St. Laurent-sur-Mer on the beach in Normandy. She said that the young Americans who came ashore on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 inspired her work.

"Those kids who landed on D-Day were just 18," she explained. "They had futures. To give us freedom, they gave up their own. That is the very best of humanity." That is why she called her sculpture "The Brave."

I am asking you to be brave, because I was not. Take the cash and let the credit go. A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush. Remember these are also words of wisdom, the semiotics of sensibility. Always look before you leap, but you must not be afraid to take the leap if you do not like what you see. Then soldiers could never go to war, mountaineers could never climb mountains, and astronauts could never go to space. There is much more to life than the future, which is more focused on the end than on the beginning. The future is an extension of the present, and the past is erosion of the future.

It is said that meditative people should be talkers, otherwise they are mental misers, mills which grind corn only for the miller. If you think of future all the time, you are bound to ignore the present and the past. You will be a kind of mental miser who will save everything for the last minute, only to find that what you saved was stolen by time. It is risky like putting all your eggs in one basket. Life, like currencies, can devalue, and wipe out your savings by surprise.

Future is important because it is the culmination of time, because nothing moves ahead unless something falls behind. You must move ahead and go through the approaching time. I am not asking you to give that up. You cannot give up living in the future, but I am asking you to give up living for the future. Take life as a story line, where every act is as important as another, where every character, however small, brings meaning to the plot. Touch every life that comes your way, enjoy every moment, and do not put away today's experience for tomorrow's expectations.

Thus I am asking you not to break the sequence. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, which are respectively the ground, the tree, and the fruit. You must take care of the ground first when you plant the seed, and then take care of the tree so that it grows to yield the fruit. I am not asking you to give up any of these things. A good gardener would not do it. But at the same time, I am asking you to believe in what is called the green thumb. Not everyone has the skills to be a good gardener. And the tree might not yield the fruit despite the best of your intentions.

Do not let the hope of success make you a coward, instead let the prospect of failure make you courageous. Think about those heroes who have fought against tyranny and occupation, knowing that death was imminent, that future was short. Ambition is to future what infatuation is to love. Inordinate ambition becomes a one-sided affair. Man disposes, God opposes. The first sign of maturity is to know you do not get everything in life.

That is also the first sign of bravery, a man who does not confront himself cannot confront others. I am asking you to be brave in order to confront yourself. Ask why future is important, ask why you must miss the near to look far. An eye on the future often brings out the worse, if not the worst, in you -- selfishness, calculation, acquisition, opportunism, arrogance, greed, and deception. Look at us, generations of us, how we have ruined our collective future in the mad rush to build our respective futures. Look at us, how we have tried to hold future in our grip, yet it has been slipping through our fingers.

In Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Cromwell is asked to fling away his ambition because by that sin fell the angels. Ambition and future go hand in hand like dream and slumber, the absurd and the absolute caught in the tangle of a chancy endeavor. Roman poet Horace cautioned, "While we are talking, envious time is fleeing; seize the day, put no trust in future." Live for today is what I mean to say. Live for today, because yesterday is history and tomorrow is hubris. You cannot recover what is gone and you cannot discover what has not come.

Give up the future for the freedom of all, because past and present are forfeited on the cutting edge of future. Future is ambition, which is compromise, which makes you a coward. Future is when a student must cram instead of challenging what he learns. Future is when the subordinate is busy satisfying the boss instead of doing his job. Future is when intellectuals bend to the wish of politicians to get their favours. Future is when Faust signed away his soul to Mephistopheles in return for his assistance.

Future is just another today on rotation tomorrow. Live in the continuous time, save for today and spend for today, live for today and die for today. Future holds you back. You do not see everything you believe, and you do not believe everything you see.

Give it up, and you will be free again. So will be the rest of us from the curse of building a castle in the air. For man who does not know if there is a tomorrow, the future is just that.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.