Over a lifetime it has been my experience to be able to feel the future coming. This intuition has been both a burden and and gift. A burden because the feeling is not paired with the gift of actual prediction so it is difficult to separate mood from gift. I can and have made reasonable predictions for many events, but there is no magic here so I don’t do sports betting or fool seriously with the randomness of chance. This feeling of the arc-of-the-future is also a gift, because some part of me is often more emotionally prepared for what is coming which translates into resilience and balance. The experience of the arc of the future is to feel the shape of things to come in terms of danger and opportunity, risk, refuge, good or bad. We all have it and this about how we might care for and feed this attribute. 

Whether your Arc of the Future depresses and cripples or energizes and motivates you depends on the quality of the information you take into your conscious and non-conscious mind, but the Arc itself is more of a feeling state than a cognitive report, hence the lack of actual event prediction. We could also call this arc the sense-of-future. We all carry within us a a non-conscious sense of future or arc but mostly this prognostic feeling state is reduced to such words as optimist or pessimist, liberal or conservative etc. The feeling of future could also be compared to the hunger state: you either feed it with a healthy mix of information or you feed it junk.

Right now in an election year the range of junk food for the arc of future is almost overwhelming. One side tends to feed fear and rage, and occasionally the other may indulge in offering you pablum, but either way your arc or sense of future is your personal responsibility. If you live in fear of crime and immigrants you might want to change and vary your diet of information. If you live in complacency and think it doesn’t matter that much, you just might want to take a closer look around you in this age. If you are thinking about choosing sides in a civil conflict you might want to read some legitimate history books to get your head straight about the damage about to be done.

This whole series has been about self awareness be it about your sense of good or now your sense of future. The information you take in can be a continuous string of “highly processed information” or it can be factual information that contains ‘roughage’ or inconvenient truth. We know now a steady diet of highly processed foods can kill you over time. No difference for you and your arc of the future. The casual, continuous, taking in of highly processed information leading to rage, anger, or complacency can kill you. So tune your Sense of Good to good information and get used to the roughage. When it comes to diet, this is what we all teach our children.