Imagining a kick-ass future

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”

— The Queen of Hearts, Alice in Wonderland

Recently, I listened to a delightful conversation on the upstream podcast between Robert Raymond and Rob Hopkins and it sent my heart and mind running. You know when you listen to something, and every word just strikes that f*ck yes chord in your body? Yeah, it was that. So today, I’d like to expand on this topic and allow my excitement to be shared.

Throughout my writing, I continue to share my feelings about the human capacity to imagine. How important- no, vital, it is to utilize our imagination and storytelling capabilities in the work of rethinking, building and living a more just, juicy and life-sustaining future. Yet, I have to admit, as I listened to the podcast, I realized just how little time I actually take to let my imagination run wild, or prompt it to push boundaries. I spend plenty of time imagining the life I long for on a personal level, and plenty of time thinking about how insane society is, but rarely do I allow a full, sensually engaging exploration of boundless future possibilities to permeate me. I know another way is possible, but when I actually go the next step and feel into it, experience it, rocket fire is lit under my ass. A newfound elation overcomes me and shoves me out of bed in the morning. We all need a story worth living, one where the future isn’t so bleak that our efforts feel like pointless drudgery.

Think about how much energy is wasted in dreading the future. How often do people read and discuss devastating world news. It’s become entirely commonplace to connect over how messed up everything is. So much so, that I wonder if I’d get strange looks for being delighted by the world and sharing news of incredible initiatives over breakfast. That’s where we’ve come to, but it’s not where we have to stay. Rob is all about what if questions, so I’ll pose my own… What if good news was mainstream instead of bad news; if people everywhere were spreading the word of amazing grassroots initiatives and victories instead of stories that leave us numb, immobilized, and feeling powerless? What if we made it a habit to sit with our morning coffee and imagine the impossible?

“The future must enter you long before it happens”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Focusing on the negative is easy. We’ve got a built in negativity bias and have been sneakily conditioned as well as blatantly bombarded by fear-based programming. Imagination, on the other hand, is an atrophied muscle that many of us feel awkward and out of practice in handling. And what wasted potential, because the imagination is arguably humanity’s best superpower. This conversation came to me at the perfect time, as I had already been pondering ways to get intentional and serious about developing my inherently-human imaginative, visionary and storytelling gifts. We focus so much on the external motions of our busy days, but what about those moments when the energy slows, those early mornings and sleepy states before bed when our consciousness is more malleable and we have the possibility to fill ourselves with positive dreams and chosen direction. Are we paying attention to these times?

It surprises me how little importance people put into this area of wasted potential. How ignorant the mainstream cultural viewpoint of imagination is, seeing it as little more than childhood whimsy with no ability to affect this “cold, hard reality”. One only needs to conduct a basic test on themselves to feel into how entirely our minds can warp our reality. Fill your mind with dreadful thoughts about the day, keep them playing, and see how it goes. Wake with conviction that the day is full of possibility, and orient towards the excitement of being alive (spontaneous or contrived), then compare your perceptions. It could even be that those two days contain identical events, but the differences in how we experience them depends on our internal response- our thoughts, attitude and the story we create. The line between real and not real is a slippery fish, and I think we better start recognizing just how real our imagination is, especially when it drives us to enact, in the physical realm, the mythopoetic stories of our depths.

As idealistic as I am, I’m also strangely practical and favour functionality. That extends even to my belief systems, the stories I tell, what I dare imagine. So I try them on for size. Nihilism, for example, didn’t feel so good. It didn’t motivate me to do much of anything, or make me enjoy the experience of being soberly alive. As a nihilist, I enjoyed little more than downing beer and communicating through self-deprecating sarcasm. On the other hand, believing that humans are spiritual beings here to evolve through life’s challenges, that are meant to dream big and contribute our essential imprint to the unfolding of this living, unified universe- now that makes me stoked to be living and breathing in this gangly ol’ meat suit o’ mine, during this mad age of Aquarius, on the planet of Earth. Health problems, dark spells, periodic identity crisis, neurodivergent difficulties and all. This story makes it all worth it.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere”

— Albert Einstein

I’m no astrology aficionado, but it takes no expert to recognize that there are some crazy planetary influences going down right now. We recently had Saturn and Neptune conjunct in Aries. Saturn, who favours patient, disciplined, structured, slow, steady and committed action, particularly in the material realm. Neptune, who says f*ck your structures, lets dream baby; who rules the intangible, fantastical, illusory, watery subconscious realms. And both of these planets in aspect (interplaying) in the sign of Aries- famously impatient, impulsive, emboldened, aggressive, and wanting nothing more than to march ahead at full speed with nothing and no-one to stop the might of their Spirit.

At first glance, this sounds like a recipe for frustration, at best, and utter chaos almost guaranteed. But nothing is all good, as nothing is all bad. All of these energies can and should be given their place on the main stage of our expression, and if we can stay grounded and focused enough to call on each of their gifts rather than giving way to some deep, psychological cat fights, then I think this year has marvellous potential. Think about it… Saturn’s grounded, stern, step-by-step discipline, guided by Neptunes boundless, creative visions, put into bold, confident and fearless action by the pioneering way of Aries. There’s pure, paradigm shifting potential in the air.

I brought our current astrology into this because it felt like a good symbolic example of how our imaginative capacity can create manifested realities when we ground it in our feeling bodies and align the vision with our actions. The future we imagine and the stories we tell guide our day to day actions in a way that, with patience and persistence, can build the future we want rather than the one we fear.

I thank Rob Hopkins, and all the other visionaries working within the realms of imagination to marry the intangible with the tangible. I’m certainly inspired to spend more time dreaming with intention and asking what if, and I hope after reading this, that you are too.

Here are some borrowed “what if” questions to prompt journalling, contemplating and feeling into with the entirety of our senses, because if we can feel it and be mad enough to believe it, then we can create it…

• “What if we considered imagination vital to our health?”

• “What if school nurtured young imaginations?”

• “What if we took play seriously?”

• “What if we followed nature’s lead?”

• “What if we became better storytellers?”

• “What if the change we need to see came not from government and business, but from you and me, from communities working together?”

• “What if birdsong drowned out the traffic?”

• “If you time-travelled to 2030, and everything turned out great, how would the future smell, feel, sound, look?”

Share