Boundaries of the Mind: Futures Literacy and Appreciating Difference - Towards a Fluidity of Curiosity, Play and Specialisation Boundaries of the mind, like rules of a game layered on a playing field, channel curiosity, testing, and learning – foils for creativity and knowledge accumulation. So goes universities, sloshing cauldrons, bounded eco-systems of curiosity, gaming the known to discover, preserve, perpetuate its contours. Peering at these odd creatures conjures the mirror of functionalism, a nagging worry that the clock might not turn without that gear, taken as an invitation to identify solutions and improvements. And then we know who we are, because fixing something vital is important and our gnawing vacuum of agency – what is to be done, how can I make a difference, let’s slay tomorrow’s uncertainties today – gets filled by rolling down the welded track of attaining predefined goals. Like telling time, we lock our gaze, attention and expectations into what we already know, almost unknowingly preserving the objectives and methods of the past behind the façade of fixing and making better. Enough. Time to break the bonds of our imaginations, no longer slave to colonizing tomorrow and reproducing the delusion of control as if that will quell fear, assure tranquility, and allow the sleep of the good. Futures Literacy as the capacity to use the future for different reasons, in different ways, in different contexts hints at another way to be. Like any capability its use is not predetermined, but anticipation is the source of fears, hopes and expectations. And it could open the door to play that fuels imagination with curiosity, condition for the cultivation, invention and sharing of difference. All without knowing if we privilege ephemerality or durability. Then we might wash the university into the ambient flow of learning as well-being, or just fun.