Henry Muhumuza

Foresight is a defining fixture of the human mind. We spend a significant portion of our time anticipating future events: the potential pleasures of an upcoming activity, how we'll execute a plan, or the difficulties we're likely to encounter from something yet-to-be.

It is a surprisingly relentless process. The tentacles of imagination spread out and project as far as they can into the future event, feeling out likelihoods. The mind weaves quite a vivid narrative of how events will play out. It can even explore multiple alternative possibilities, the number depending on how much information about the causal variables the mind possesses.

A similar and inverse phenomenon is hindsight, the understanding of an event after it has happened. Here, seemingly fragmented and unrelated events magically coalesce into a story. You suddenly realize that a narrative which seemed improbable at first, or didn't even rise to conscious awareness, couldn't have been anything else. If only you had looked closer at what the events were telling you.

Sadly, lessons from hindsight cannot be applied retrospectively. They cannot be used to change what has been. Their power lies in prospective application—not just to future situations similar to past ones from which those lessons were learned. But they can be applied to totally novel situations if you are attentive enough. I've noticed that knowledge isn't always purely additive. In the realm of knowledge, one plus one isn't always equal to two. Two ideas can merge into a singular new idea and produce insight so profound it cannot be deduced from the mere sum of its constituents. Like the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to produce water.

The common thread running through foresight and hindsight is the narrative. Both tell a story. Foresight paints a narrative the way it is likely to unfold. Hindsight creates a narrative from what has been. These two narratives give us a blueprint for how to order our future actions or make sense of what has happened to us. The narrative adds structure, elegance, and meaning to experience. As it's being woven, it creates just enough distance between the subject and the anticipated or past experience to allow for strategy and deliberation.

Just like in a film, the narrative also creates the expectation of a resolution. Things always work out in the end, however convoluted the protagonist's journey.

But what about the present, the heat of the moment? Why does it feel so structure-less? For most of us, the present moment is where carefully crafted plans die, where they are put to shame by unaccounted-for circumstances. It's where we drop principles we previously vowed to live by, where we resort to inelegant improvisation, where we feel like we've lost control. We simply resign ourselves to drifting helplessly in the forceful currents of the moment.

This happens because we lose track of the narrative in the moment. We think of the present as something that has to be survived, endured first and then made sense of later. Not as something you can actively and carefully steer to reflect your very nature and desires, both in how it unfolds and in the outcome itself. We narrate backwards and forwards but experience a kind of narrative collapse in the middle.

I've noticed that the most charismatic leader, the most memorable orator, the most romantic lover—all have one thing in common. They tell their own story. They do not just passively observe and let the constantly straying edges of the present moment dictate how the story unfolds. They rein them in. They decide what they want the story to be and intentionally direct and sequence their steps toward that end.

Consider a mundane disagreement with a partner or friend. The natural, unauthored trajectory—the "forceful current"—is a descent into defensiveness. You feel the heat rise, the urge to snap back, to win the point. That is the script writing you. To author that moment is to mentally step out of the frame for a split second. You look at the scene and decide, "In this story, I am not the petty antagonist. I am the one who de-escalates." Suddenly, your next line of dialogue changes. You don't suppress the emotion; you channel it into a character arc you actually want to inhabit. You ask a question instead of making an accusation. You've just rewritten the ending of the scene in real-time.

One might object that this is merely performance, that the politician always aware of the narrative they're crafting or the lover always curating their image is not truly living but performing. That treating yourself as a character in a story rather than as pure freedom and possibility is a kind of inauthenticity. That perhaps the "present moment where plans die" is actually the only moment of authentic existence, where we encounter ourselves as we truly are rather than as the protagonists we imagine ourselves to be. After all, there's something undeniably sweet about people who seem utterly unselfconscious, who aren't performing at all.

Perhaps it’s not true that we lose the narrative in the present—maybe we're just telling bad narratives unconsciously. The person paralyzed by anxiety in the moment is narrating catastrophe. The one who abandons their principles is following a different story, often one they don't even know they're telling. The solution then isn't to narrate more but to narrate better and more deliberately.

But I maintain there's a difference between unconscious narrative drift and conscious authorship, between being written by stories you don't choose and writing the story you want to live. The question is not whether to narrate, but whether to do so with intention or surrender that power to forces outside your awareness—and whether you're even aware that you're making that choice.