The rock just sat there, all alone, continuing to ponder.
If there really was a future, our impatient friend needed to know about it.
"And what a unique thing it would be", he mused - "to know about things that might, or even might not, happen. To just be aware of the passing of time would be enough".
For you see, rocks knew nothing about it . And so there was no need to worry, let alone hope for the best, or even prepare for the worst. Nothing went wrong in the now.
"Might it be possible," thought the rock, "for whatever it was that might be ‘outside’ the now, to somehow go wrong"?
Our rock, like all his friends, existed in one dimension, in other words, they knew they took up space. And while in their rock-like way while they grasped it, they felt out of their elements when it came to understanding time. If a rock had knowledge of space AND time, and the ability to determine things in both dimensions, it would be massive! But really, how much weight could a mere mortal rock actually put on any kind of far reaching concept as the possibility of the ‘future'.
"And then of course there was the other possibility of experiencing the ‘past' with all its illusionary restraints", he surmised. "How might a rock deal with the past? And what on earth would it be like for a rock to live in the past? To leave all this ‘now’ behind? Or would the now then be in front? Would there be any regrets? Might there not be a monumental sense of loss?"
The thought of time and travel, imagining the past and the future, the idea of breaking through to another dimension, these things just made our impatient rock more impatient to try to find out.
