To those of us who follow the Gregorian calendar, today (January 1) is the only day that we pretend exists in its own unique space within time — where what is “present” shifts into some sort of soft focus so that something we call “possibility” can become visible to the camera.
Oh sure, every day is the first day of the rest of your life, but only literally. You can quit smoking on July 10 but, figuratively, that doesn’t carry the same emotional weight we place on stubbing that last one out at 11:59pm on New Year’s Eve. (Even if July 10 probably carries more likelihood of success.)
Today, as Kierkegaard wrote, “A year has passed, and a new one has begun; nothing has happened in it yet. The past is finished, the present is not; only the future is, which is not.” 1
Tomorrow we’ll awake again solidly in the present, the possibilities of that future diminished — as they diminish every day; or at least, that’s how it seems to most of us. We experience the end of even the most wonderful, fortunate, very good days as a reduction of time, a narrowing of choices.
We can’t live in the future, as much as we like to imagine ourselves there: “the complaint so often heard that people forget the present for the future,” Kierkegaard wrote, “is perhaps well founded.”
Speaking for myself, January 1 looms large over December, sometimes even earlier. At spare moments I find myself wondering about goals, budgets, fancies — ideas for things I might like to accomplish in the coming year. Should I write them down? In what form? A piece of paper on the front of the fridge, a text file saved to my phone?
And then the day itself appears. It should be eagerly arrayed with promise, this day outside of time, but for me it usually drags itself out of bed already exhausted — not from any revelries the night before, but for having been so roughly handled already in the weeks prior. Any thoughts I might have had about eating healthier, being more productive, even, God forbid, exercise … well. It’s a holiday! Let’s make waffles.
But Kierkegaard has not joined us on this particular special day to talk of botched resolutions or the setting of realistic quarterly deadlines. Instead he has come to show us something far more valuable: the secret of time.
What is this secret? That we, mere mortals be, live lives constrained within the ongoing single moment of the present (which is also the past), while that ongoing present itself is constrained by “the future.” But the hold that the future has on our minds is a “demonstration of our divine origin,” because without the future there would be no past, and we would be held “captive to the service of the moment.”
Instead, we live each moment in dread or in hope of the future; we make choices based on what we think those choices will lead to in subsequent moments; we “experience” things and assume those experiences will prepare us for when they inevitably repeat themselves.
Our struggle with each present moment is a struggle with something particular, whether it’s one damn thing after another, or the same damn thing over and over. Each one is overpowered by this “future” that we simply can’t see in its entirety, no matter how soft our focus goes on New Year’s Day, because the future is not particular — it is, as Kierkegaard says, “the whole.”
“How, then, should we face the future?” he asks, then answers: Like a sailor on the ocean, who “does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing,” but instead navigates using the stars in the sky. “Why? Because they are faithful… By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal.”
Think about it like this: the present can’t be understood until it has become the past, and then we can reflect on it. (Bearing in mind that the way in which the past is viewed then also continues to change with time.) If we don’t know what even the next hour holds, let alone the ultimate future of all, then the present itself can only ever be mired in uncertainty.
The only way for us to fathom “the future” is to see it within its own context, or “ground”: that is to say, eternity. For simplicity’s sake, we can say that time and its segments exist along a continuum, and that continuum must then exist inside of something else; the eternal is that which exists outside of time.
According to Kierkegaard, the eternal is God, and the way in which human beings connect with God is through faith. (And we all have faith, he argues; faith can’t be given, granted, learned, or earned, it is something to which we all have access, if we only will it for ourselves.)
Because we have a relationship with the eternal through faith, we are actually not constrained to the present moment, after all — faith endows us with a certain expectation of something beyond the moment, beyond even the future within time.
And what is it that we expect? Victory. Specifically, he quotes Scripture, “that all things must serve for good those who love God.”
If a believer has an expectation of this victory, then she has “conquered” the future, and can now actually focus on the present, without being agitated by all that uncertainty.
Doesn’t that sound lovely? Everything is going to be all right! You will get that promotion, the tumor will be benign, the knock in the car’s engine will work itself out, somehow. All manner of things will be well, etc. Faith expects victory! Who needs a New Year’s resolution?
Except… no. That’s not how any of this works. Kierkegaard isn’t talking about an expectation of victory inside of time — victory for today, victory for tomorrow. No, he isn’t even talking about victories (plural), but only victory (singular): “You speak of many victories, but faith expects only one, or, more correctly, it expects victory.”
Things still might go quite badly for your job, your health, your car. There will be wars, pestilence, insane people appointed to positions of power over others. All manner of things will be well, etc., but not yet.
So as we begin a new year once again, Kierkegaard shows us to face the future, not by creating a multitude of expectations — goals and resolutions and notions and hopes, some of which might be disappointed and some fulfilled — but by resting in the one expectation that won’t be disappointed: that of faith’s expectation in victory. This victory, which can’t be proven or denied by experience because it arises from our human connection with the eternal, will come, not tomorrow or next week, not even by December 31, but “at last.”