Re: Groping toward the future

Alfred Lang (alfred.lang who-is-at psy.unibe.ch)
Tue, 5 Jan 1999 10:21:52 +0100

Dear XMCA-community,

a bit late, if you take 01-01 to be one of those ritual passages from a bit
of past into a bit of future, I wish everybody a good past when looking
back at it after another year. Mike's story of us walking backwards into
the future provokes me as being actually descriptive of our factual
behaving rather than as a reasonable "should". Even if we imagine ourselves
as holding hands and straining to turn heads, the single angelus given
company. Because we can do that only with our immediate neighbors and it
forces us somhow into an overconforming group.

So I like to propose another story to feel oneselves temporally involved in
past and future and fully present. It is simply the situation of
cultivating guests and scouts.
Guests bring glimpses into other worlds and so do scouts going and bringing
back of their experience. The interesting thing in what they say and
demonstrate in the form of stories and artefacts is for us to find out
whether such presents us with models or similes of our past or of our
futures. Any mixture thereof has to be taken in consideration. So it
amounts to a task, the ordinary task of being alive: to compare and
valuate, to bring it in relation what we already are. And to construct out
of that bewildering diversity our own decent future.

Have a good time, Alfred
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Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang who-is-at psy.unibe.ch
Website: http://www.cx.unibe.ch/psy/ukp/langpapers/
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