On not being able to look the future in the eye

Time was, when we were all signed up to progress – things would get better and it was our job to help. Sure there were questions of what progress looked like, and whether ends justified means. But the grand narrative was secure – with hard work and good will, things were destined to get better.

But climate breakdown and its out-riding crises, mean that the future is no longer believable. We can no longer look the future in the eye.

So words like hope and dreams and vision – words that are by definition future-focused – are broken. They feel obligatory because we feel we need something to help us face the crack of doom. At the same time they feel treacherous because in our hearts we sense that all promises of the future are already compromised.

I think we deal with this in several ways.

One way is to explore and build alternative futures via non violent direct action, QS4CA, the Green Party, Living Witness, XR, listening to people like Nate Hagens and Manda Scott.

Another is to make place more important. Growing roots in the town where I live, supporting green ways of being, having conversations across difference with the people I live with here in the town.

A third is to become more present-focused with a Buddhist-led sense of presentness.

All of the these are worthwhile and needed.

But if the problem is really with the future, if everything future-related feels broken, then perhaps we need to pay more attention to words that are simply of the present. Words that carry no echo of the future. Words like: Care, kindness, compassion, community, sharing, solidarity, respect, generosity, integrity, grief, acceptance, honesty

These words comfort me much more than hope or dreams or visions, or objectives, or strategy, or winning, or loosing….. All of which have the future – the future we are ceasing to believe in – embedded in them.

These words that don’t carry the future have - without exception - some wonderful characteristics:

- They are always directed towards someone else. Another person, or another being or a particular place or ecosystem. It is impossible to be kind in isolation.

- They are all about means, not ends. They are agnostic about the ‘why’ of things, only the how. If we are being generous for some ulterior reason then we have betrayed true generosity.

- They are not based on law. They carry no governance, no accountability, no risk assessment. What they often do carry though is vulnerability and in this sense they are often deep gifts.

- These words are all really hard for the market to co-opt. Hope is embedded in almost every aspect of the market because we are always hoping that this bit of stuff will make us happier – but its really hard to use compassion to sell stuff.

Words like care, kindness, respect, generosity are by definition about relationships rather than about things. They reach across boundaries. They all build trust.

And as a token from the Earth that we may be on a true path, it is also notable that with these virtues we typically end up with less stuff, not more stuff. Generosity, sharing, kindness, honesty, integrity are typically ‘stuff-negative’ and energy-minimising.

Paradoxically these words that lack a sense of the future are all ways of being that I would really want to build into any conceivable future. At a time when the lack of future makes it really hard to know what the right path forward is, then suddenly here are all these ways of being – kindness, respect, sharing, compassion – that are exactly the things that I think we would want to have and grow in any possible future. These words that by their nature hold no sense of the future, turn out to be the bricks from which I think we can slowly build something that is compatible with both the now and the becoming.

Of course these present-centred virtues are restatements of some very obvious eternal truths: be kind, care for each other, be honest, work with others, look after for your community. This is reassuring – but also makes me wonder if there is anything new or worthwhile here. But I think today’s world transform these words from being merely ethically good to perhaps the only way to know and to build an unknowable future. If the future is built around kindness, forgiveness, sharing, then we can start on these right now. We don’t have to know The Answer. They are like Tai Chi for the soul – ways of being that help grow a future that is simply impossible to know in any detail today. Perhaps they are practical, embodied prayers for our unknowable future.