Future experiences that "WERE" in store for me

Question

"Sitting on the airplane and watching the clouds pass beneath me, I let my thoughts wander to the new experiences that were in store for me during the next 2 years of living abroad."Since he is talking about future events, why does he use "were", as oppose to "are in store for me"?

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

to be in store (for someone) is much like to be waiting to happen (to someone).

The sentence is problematic because let is both the present and the past of the verb to let. A native speaker, however, picks up the idea that this is a narrative from the first phrase, and assumes the past tense. The use of were (not are) then confirms our guess that the whole sentence is in the past tense.

Here the idea is that the new experiences were waiting to happen (later). They were already "stored" somewhere in some fictitious, invisible place. Later they would be "released from storage", i.e., finally be experienced. It's all metaphorical, of course.

Mostly, though, it's a matter of keeping the tenses lined up:

I wonder what is in store for me during the next year.
I wondered what was in store for me during the next year.

It's not really different from tense sequences like this:

I think I have enough money to buy that shirt.
I thought I had enough money to buy that shirt.

(In both cases the buying of the shirt could be in the future, but that doesn't affect the choice of tenses.)

CJ

Avangi · Answer

<<

Sitting on the airplane and watching the clouds pass beneath me, I let my thoughts wander to the new experiences that were in store for me during the next 2 years of living abroad."

Since he is talking about future events, why does he use "were", as oppose to "are in store for me"? >>

They were future then, but we can't really say that they are future now.
If you say "that are in store," you mean that at the time of writing, they had not yet happened.

But your narrative is about your thoughts etc. which took place in the past. They could have been three years ago, in which case two years into the relative future, when viewed from the present, would already have passed.

So it's quite possible and logical that at the time of writing, those "future events" were in fact past events.

Edit. I see Jim's point. I had assumed "let" was past tense because of the presence of "were" in the sentence. If we use a verb with unambiguous tense, we see that the problem is grammatical rather than logical:

Sitting on the plane, I told her about the challenges which are in store for me. This does not work!

Well, now I'm having "third thoughts." If there were context which delineated events in the past, present, and future, and it were clear that at the time of writing the challenges are/were still in the future, perhaps it would work.

I know Jim says it's never wrong to shift to the past, but I'm not sure that it's always wrong not to.

Future experiences that "WERE" in store for me

"Sitting on the airplane and watching the clouds pass beneath me, I let my thoughts wander to the new experiences that were in store for me during the next 2 years of living abroad."

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Sitting on the airplane and watching the clouds pass beneath me, I let my thoughts wander to the new experiences that were in store for me during the next 2 years of living abroad."

Related Questions