Did you feel it? An unspoken gravity to your day, a solemnity to your casual glance, a whispered weightiness in the setting of the sun. That quiet sense of a significant day slipping by.

It’s been twenty years since hands were shaken, backs patted and signatures given to a new set of ideas, principles and plans for the governance of Northern Ireland.

It’s one year until a new set of ideas, principles and plans for the governance of the United Kingdom will be agreed; hands will be shaken, backs will be patted and signatures given.

Twenty years since Good Friday; one year to Exit Day.

Perhaps a Radio 4 broadcaster was right when he said in 2004,“History always hangs heavily on the shoulders of people in Northern Ireland.” For such a small place we do have many difficult contested memories.

In an excellent and soon to be published paper, Professor John Brewer of Queen’s University talks about a “burden of the future” being on those who live in “post-conflict” societies. In that they need to deal with divided past(s) for the sake of a shared future.

In this Brewer does not to advocate forgetting nor seeking agreement on what happened. But rather suggests the necessity of accepting the inevitability of different perspectives and multiple pasts in order to choose not to let these dictate present and future action.

History can be thought of as a series of choices and happenings; we can control the choices but not the happenings.

For the most part it is the happenings – events, incidents, choices made by others – that shape our experience more than our choices. Of course this is so. Each of us is just one person in the midst of a complex, historied, ever changing world.

But I would also argue that often and particularly in Northern Ireland, we have more autonomy, more choice than we imagine.

As we pass through the twenty year anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement this month and progress towards the day when the United Kingdom will leave the European Union, perhaps we ought to feel some “burden of the future”.

Debate regarding arrangements for the island of Ireland after “Brexit” continue; the countdown to exit is on and Stormont still stands empty.

It is my hope that in this next year the people of Northern Ireland might feel the weight of the future more than that of the past. Maybe, just maybe, if we can allow space for our multiple and divided histories we might be more able take ownership over our roles as the authors of all the tomorrows yet to come.