We are all sailing into the Great Unknown
Ever notice how when you read a book or watch a movie that involves adventure, you always feel vaguely like things are going to work out alright? Probably because we can expect some sort of resolution or ending, where our characters are great. Or okay. Or at least “okay for now.”
It doesn’t matter if there’s a dystopia involved (think of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series) or if it’s just an adventure film series (e.g., Pirates of the Caribbean)—there is always some sort of resolution where we know that at least “for now” or “for a while” our characters are okay, even if it’s clear that they still have problems to face ahead.
I would like to point out that it’s only in retrospect that the characters in the stories would realize that they had a reprieve from the ongoing adventure/dystopia they faced. As Kierkegaard famously said, “life can only be understood backwards; it must be lived forwards is.” History makes sense of things by in the same way that all stories are written: a “stopping place” is chosen, signifying the end of a period or story.
Those stopping points are always fiction, even when applied to real life. Because even if one particular character or story line dies off, others have been developing all along and they roll forward.
We are constantly on a journey through space and time, heading who knows where with an unknown outcome. I will admit that there’s little comfort in that framing, but it is nevertheless true. So OF COURSE we struggle to make sense of it by viewing it in smaller pieces.
“We are constantly on a journey through space and time, heading who knows where with an unknown outcome. ”
If you think of the United States of America as a ship, it is one that has always been sailing into the Great Unknown. Our founding fathers knew it when they created our democratic republic, and our history (always written by the winners) has made it seem as if we live with a unified goal to continue our democracy forever. There is plenty of US history that demonstrates periods when that was seriously in question, but by and large, unless you had AP history in the 21st century, it is possible that you never heard any of that. Because we like to teach our feel-good stuff (“and then we beat the Nazis and won the war, freeing all sorts of people in the process”) way more than we like telling the full story, which includes acts of barbarism, threats of fascism, etc.
I find that embracing the idea that we are—and have always been—sailing into the Great Unknown to be reassuring in many ways. Today isn’t a departure from normal; it’s just a continuation of what has always been. We are the characters living life forwards. Turn your fact toward the sun, and take one small step each day toward someplace good that you want to go.
Keep on sailing into the Great Unknown.
Image by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
