adjusting the wave

things arrive based on how they feel, let’s say, the felt ebb and flow. picture a waveform moving toward you - up and down, up and down, you can see the ups and downs as you look down the waveform away from you into the distance. you can tell which one's coming, a trough or a crest.

okay: add fog to the room, so you can only see a single up/down of the wave. maybe the "up" is touching you and the "down" is further out and then it's fog after that, or maybe "down" is touching you and "up" is further out and then it's fog after that

the rendering engine's priority is continuity of experience

now: freeze time, touch the waveform where it meets you, and run your hand out until your arm is fully outstretched. bend the waveform at that point. you won't be able to bend it very much, but you can bend it a little: you can either make the next thing you experience a steeper bend or a shallower bend, based on where you are. or, you can grab the part of the wave that intersects the axis and pull or push it, changing the interval/speed just a bit instead of changing the amplitude/intensity

let's recap: time is frozen, an infinite wave continues to travel to/into you, it's foggy so you can't see the next trough/peak, and you've just reached out to adjust some aspect of the cycle completion you're about to experience, making it happen a bit slower or a bit faster, or making it a bit louder or a bit quieter.

unfreeze time, press play, remove the fog

observe: the waveform off into the distance has changed. the stuff you now see coming up in the distance makes it look like the change you made to your own immediate future was inevitable.

prior to reading this piece, you might come from thinking of the future as something that definitely exists, something that you can steer into/around/through, something you can plan for. if that approach is giving you pain/grief, this piece describes a mental heuristic for tuning the incoming future-stream without requiring you to totally break your mental model of the future's existence.