Temporal Agency: Reimagining Future Possibilities

Sor Juana's writings often project forward, imagining intellectual and spiritual futures that transcended her present constraints. She demonstrated how present circumstances, while real and limiting, need not completely determine one's temporal horizon. Temporal agency means refusing the narrative that poverty locks one into a predetermined future and instead actively constructing visions of possibility. For individuals experiencing poverty, temporal agency involves education and skill-building oriented toward future freedom, imagining careers and life paths not yet accessible, and maintaining hope anchored in concrete planning. This framework resists both fatalism and false optimism by recognizing constraints while insisting on agency within time. By studying history, learning from others' trajectories, and developing explicit future scenarios, individuals exercise temporal agency. This practice counters the psychological impact of poverty—which often collapses time into an eternal present of deprivation—by rebuilding the capacity to imagine, plan for, and work toward different futures while maintaining dignity in current circumstances.