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...but we can't feel it, and that's the problem

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I have been given the gift of prophecy, and I believe it's a gift I share with many of you. To see what I mean, try performing the following thought experiment on any morning you go to work. Think about the moment when you will leave the office. I bet you can see it perfectly. I know I can. It will be dark outside, and I can see myself walking down the four flights of stairs to street level in the Economics Faculty where I teach night classes. I'll pass the old lady in the wooden panelled booth and head out into the street toward the tram stop. I'll be relieved to be finished, excited about going home, and possibly looking forward to doing some writing when I get there. How will it be for you? I bet you know exactly what it will look like: the parking garage or the bus stop. You know every inch of your office. It's a path you've tread hundreds of times. I've only been working at the University of Latvia for a few months, but I could get from the fifth floor to my tram stop with my eyes closed. I can see the future, and I know exactly where I'll be, where I'll go, and what will happen when I leave work.

I know all of these things, but I can't feel them. In spite of the number times as I make my way from the college to the tram, I'm constantly surprised at how tired and defeated I feel when I'm actually there. During the day I entertain thoughts of going home and getting something done in the evening. Sure I'll be home late, but I'll be home, fed, and happy by 9:30, that gives me at least a couple of hours to do some reading, right? That works in theory, but the actual walk to the tram stop is much different. Yes, I'm relieved to be going home, but I'm not nearly as perky as I had imagined myself being. In fact, I'm more or less dragging myself to the tram. All of the sights and sounds of Riga in the evening are there, just as I had imagined them, but they mean something very different. Earlier, when I was seeing this future homeward slog, these cracks in the pavement, dingy hotels, and shut newspaper stands were signs of my victory over the day. Seeing them was supposed to be a treat and they would light my way home. During the actual slogging, however, they bear silent witness to a broken man in his overcoat, staring straight ahead and slightly down (to avoid a puddle) utterly shattered by the day and not feeling victorious at all. When I'm actually walking home I'm not the hero of the day, just a survivor of it.

Seeing the future is not just a trick I can perform in my day to day life, I can see further, to my next vacation for instance. I used my ability when I decided to go to Thailand a couple of years ago. I could see myself carelessly lounging on beaches, eating magnificent food, and feeling that irreplaceable feeling of being free and alone in a very different and faraway place. I got on a plane, and all of these things actually happened, but looking back at my journal entries from that time, I see that I wasn't having much fun. What I couldn't feel from my perch in Geneva where I was envisioning this getaway was the loneliness that being a solo traveller would produce being in a culture as foreign as in Thailand. I spent a lot of time chasing after Swiss and Swedish girls who weren't interested in me, and complaining about the Thais, who were only interested in my money. Well, who could blame them? It's not as though I was making a long-term comittment to the place. My ability to predict the future was perfect: I imagined what I would do and all of those things came true, exactly as I had planned them, and yet somehow, I couldn't feel what these events would do to me, and I left Thailand disappointed.

Now I'm preparing to travel again, this time with Baiba, so I've mitigated the lonliness problem, and again I can see into the future. First we will go to the U.S.. Of course I know what that will be like, we're visiting all of my old haunts. How will I feel there, with Baiba, after five years of living abroad? That I can't predict. What about when we travel further, as we plan to do? Perhaps to Argentina, or Mexico, maybe back to Thailand. I can see all of the things we will do in these places, but what's missing is how we will feel. We are on a mission to find what we want to do and where we want to do it. Will we know it when we see it? It's a place, it's something to do, but most of all, it's a feeling. Where we will feel it I can't know, any better than I can know how I will feel coming out of the university this evening. I can tell you about it, but I'm not there yet. I don't yet feel its weight. I can't feel the lightness of travel either, not until we're there, and that's the risk of traveling. We know where we are going, but we won't know what it feels like until we're there.

And what about you? I bet many of you also have the gift of prophecy. If your around my age, you know exactly what will happen when you go most places and do most things. Our route is clear, even when we make deliberate attempts to change it. But the feeling, that we will only know once we get there.