Look to a Brighter Future

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Listen to this excerpt from the audiobook of From What Is To What If. It has been adapted for the web.

We need to become better storytellers in such a way that we can, through a variety of media, give people a visceral sense of what a positive future would sound, taste, feel and look like. We need to create stories where the kind of future we want to see becomes commonplace, everyday. We need to tell stories with an underlying sense that the mere telling of them can create a degree of inevitability about their becoming a reality, and a sense that speaking them out loud is also of great benefit to our own mind, a powerful antidote to despondency and trauma.

When I spoke with James McKay, I asked him how spending the past ten years drawing and giving visual form to a hopeful, positive vision of the future had affected him personally. He told me, “I came from a place where I was incredibly bleakly pessimistic. I didn’t have any hope. I was originally interested in seeing the optimistic side almost as a thought experiment exercise to break out of that thought process. . . . I’ve had to be optimistic, but I’ve found that through that, I’m now quite passionately optimistic.”

We need to tell these stories in a wide variety of media: in films, podcasts, drawings, graffiti art, dance, plays, novels, music. These all help to familiarize us with the future they are portraying in different ways. We need also to use stories to bring to life the future that will be inevitable if we don’t change how we do things, and to support people in letting go of and grieving for the things we are losing around us right now.

We need to make intentional spaces for people to tell, share, or co-create these stories, spaces that are well facilitated and feel safe and inviting. We need to ground them in people, in characters we recognize, in places we recognize. Our stories need to try to speak to our deep memories, our bone memory, the things that fundamentally move and touch people, that really resonate. They need to make use of foreshadowing. And most important of all, we need to tell them as often as we can.