Have you ever reached a point in your life when you stop to ask, “What now?”  It’s a curious question because normally the issue doesn’t arise.  I mean, for the most part, life is a matter of doing this or that, getting something, doing something, going somewhere.  But seldom are you left just sitting with absolutely nothing in mind, remorsefully asking “What now?”

But it isn’t just about hitting a wall, the existential confrontation. The exception to the anomaly is the moment when the question is not just one but two questions.  There is the proverbial fork in the road ahead.  Then you have a choice of direction; and naturally the question arises, “What now?”

I will not understate the necessity to consider the matter carefully. Uncertainty is as much an indication of desire as it is of anxiety. Very often we regard the future with unmeasured hope and expectation. While this is neither unique nor unacceptable, it requires the limitation of fact. Fact is traditionally a sobering element of any discussion. Yet when considering one’s future it is often preferred to mystify the atmosphere rather than to clarify it.

But there is another fact to be kept in mind, one that is not a dampening of the future, rather a strengthening of the present. Oddly one’s present circumstances can as easily be overlooked as the future can be glorified. It is however a serious danger to be kept in mind if for no other reason than that today’s present soon becomes tomorrow’s past. That same history will project what we think of the future.

It is this circuity, this emblematic dissolution of the present into the past then into the future, that contributes to the difficulty of determining “What now?” Once again I stress the importance of careful consideration because the object is never to dilute the present or the future, nor to embellish either of them wistfully.  Rather the project is one of logic, that curative feature of thinking having the quality of being justifiable by reason. Confronting this level of rationality is naturally seldom intuitive.  Impulse isn’t a credential for the resolution. Nor is spontaneity.

How it is that one accomplishes the inference that leads to the answer to “What now?” is itself an additional complication to the already broad enough contemplation. Nonetheless if we pause to allow the dust to settle or the sediment to fall, we’ll soon be left with a lucidity through which to perceive a coherence. The conclusion may be so simple, so pure that it appears at first to lack substance. But not unlike most realities their resonance clings to us and becomes immutable.  The inflexibility is however well established. The entire concept of motion is thus pacified.