Perception is of the future

I see the lamp at the ceiling—see it as the lamp that will still be there tomorrow, and after that. But the day after, and the next, and so on, I never look at it again. Thus, I fail to corroborate what I saw that one time: that the lamp at the ceiling would be the one that would be there tomorrow. I failed the future that was promised in the present.

But that is okay. We do it all the time. We leave the promise of things where it should be: with the things.

When, after a long while, we see something a second time, we do not see it as if for the first time, but immediately feel at ease with it, realising a bit of its then future—even though we miss out everything in-between then and now.

Feeling at home with the things, streets, buildings, situations, and places from our past sometimes feels like a return to the past. It may be filled with melancholy, when central to the feeling is a profound sense of loss—of the time passed without our acknowledging their presence, and their promise of future affordances.