The future is every choice you might ever make: a luminescent tree forever branching out. The branches intertwine with others, directions change with every second, every blink of an eye. If you are lucky, if you can hold the world still for a moment, you might catch a glimpse.
The Jedi believe that you can do this at any point of your life, trained or untrained. This important. Belief shapes action.
If the Force is flowing through you, you may glimpse the path you should or must take—or maybe the path that will carry you where you should be. Make the best possible choice at a given moment.
A human child aged three can make this choice—it can say 'yes' and forsake its family and home, and stand among the other Jedi. It can say 'no'—after all, no child this young will choose to leave all they know if-
Well. There are two ifs there.
1. If the child is happy, and loved, then such a choice will come from the Force. A step towards what they were meant to be.
2. If the child is unloved, unwanted or worse, then it will want to run. Will you leave it to suffer, if you can take it away? Will you leave it in a place where one day it may find the Dark Side in its anger, and fear and pain?
So the Jedi say.
A child is clay, say the Dagoyan Masters. It makes no choices of its own—faced with the expectations of its parents, who see the prestige of a venerable Knight, faced with the hope of the Jedi themselves, the child will always choose to come.
The voice of the Force is not so loud as to drown out the voices your ears hear, the truth of your eyes.
You parents want you to go, to live among the stars, serving the Republic. They want to say to others that you make a difference.
The stranger wants you to come, wants you to follow their steps. Unquestioning.
If you barely have any substance, if you are a formless lump that is yet to become a true person, how can you choose?
Anakin is too old, Yoda says. A half-filled vessel, with ideas muddying the water. His intuition is not born out of the Force, it does not guide his steps. He knows the Jedi are strong, that they carry swords of light, that their voice is heard.
He wants to be a Jedi, he says, but what he means is I want power and I want to be acknowledged.
Anakin is too young, Yoda does not say. A half-filled vessel, with ideas that are not yet his. He follows those who lead, he wants to please those that are stronger than him.
He wants to be a Jedi, he says, but what he means is I want mom to be proud and I want Padme to admire me.
Once upon a time, there had been different futures without the Chosen One for the Jedi.
The one where they burn up long before Palpatine takes his first breath. Where they pick every battle, try to save every child, hold every hand, until the last of them stands alone facing the Zygerrian slavers and realizes there will be no one to pass the torch to the future generations.
Or the one where they build their own ivory tower and turn to the Force completely, and as shiny the white walls of their fortress are, they cannot outshine the dark.
Or perhaps, it's more accurate to say that once upon a time, the Jedi could have lost their futures.
There is one where they take the power, because alone they can never do enough. Where they rule—at first, because there is no one else they can trust to do the right thing, but later—how easy is it to look at those who cannot see the future, the bigger perspective, to whom the Force does not speak and say 'We are better. We were meant for this'?
There had been no Sith in this future.
Or perhaps, there had only been the Sith.
The future is an emerging order—a myriad of little dots forming patterns over and over. The moment you choose, a wave ripples and the pattern changes its shape.
A Jedi joins the Council. A Jedi dies. A Jedi leaves the Order, because they do not listen to his words, do not want to follow his ideals.
A boy stays on Tattooine. A boy is kidnapped by a Sith. A boy dies. A boy joins the Jedi Order.
A boy and a queen become friends. A boy and a queen die. A boy kisses a queen.
A boy dies. A boy fights. A boy kneels.
Another boy dies. Another boy takes his father lightsaber.