Anticipation is a practice that seeks to diminish the fear that awakens in us what will come: an attempt to explore the uncertainty of the future. This predictive intention is based on our need to decrease the anxiety caused by the lack of control over the unknown. Something reflected by the compulsive obsessive in excess, but continues to be present in all human behaviour. Who among us would dare to run across a new place blindfolded?
That’s why we were bred as readers and builders of hypotheses rest on past experiences or visions, in order to address what we can not handle, a past that can only return through stories. That is for me the magical essence of culture: not only for enabling the understanding among a group of people, but also for the production and support of experiences the group accepted as safe.
For that reason we consume stories on which we rely, believing that we can manage thus the flow of the future and then control our fears.
Stories like the ideologies that surround us with certainties: the future dictatorship of the proletariat or the benefits of capitalism for poor people, as a consequence of the overflowing wealth of the cup. Other stories such as religious or scientific that anticipate a scenario where we would find after our life. Also, when such stories are not enough, we have horoscopes, letters that read the future, astrology and other resources. These are elements that if they are credible, supplement the general logic and give us tools to deal with our individual insecurities.
Technically, one of the ways to detect our relationship with the future lies in the way we start to write on a blank sheet. In this way graphology suggests that when we write the margin that our text let, marks the way we approach the future. Accordingly if our writing clings to the edge of the blade, its denote a certain fear to face what is coming and its consequences, while if we choose to start writing after a broad space, its suggests a leap into the unknown, toward the blank sheet of life.
Moreover and as a snapshot of our soul, in all of what we scribble our stroke drawing represents a personal use of the space, where the tensions and outline addresses a journey and a story. Even the canvas or the blade may not be there, but the gesture of our movement always builds a path and therefore a message for anyone who wants to interpret it. Messages based on past experiences, messages that reinforce our trust on us or exploratory messages about what will happen. In all cases, our line remains a search to meet the future.
© Sebastián Guerrini. www.guerriniisland.com
