Welcome to Field Notes. Here, you’ll find short reflections and questions to support your intentional life. Please comment to share your experiences of living with attention.
After taking a look at my last two posts, here and here, I realized that I seem to be writing an unintended, but very welcome, series on the uses of the imagination. Here’s the third in this surprise series. I think it will be the last for now. But the imagination is so integral to being attentive and intentional and human that it will no doubt resurface again many times. Also, and again, this post contains only one Field Note, instead of the usual two.
What will your life look like ten years from now? How comfortable are you thinking about the future?
I facilitate a women’s discussion group whose most recent read is Imaginable: How to Create a Hopeful Future in Your Life, Your Community, the World by Jane McGonigal, a video game designer and futurist. Her book outlines various practices designed to help her readers strengthen their imaginative capacity around the future. Most of us have at least some (maybe a lot) of anxiety about future events. McGonigal encourages us not to run from, ignore, or otherwise bury our fears; instead, she asks us to grow our capacity to tolerate discomfort and envision the future by implementing specific tools. Evidently, this is what futurists do all the time. These tools include imagining in detail what your life will be like ten years from today; coming up with one fact about life on Earth that you are positive will not change and then doing the research to prove yourself wrong; and looking for what she calls “signals of change,” small and generally unnoticed clues to future circumstances that pop up around us daily. These mental exercises force our brains to work in all sorts of unexpected and unfamiliar ways. According to McGonigal, the result is a deeper sense of investment and agency in shaping the future and more resiliency and less stress when the future becomes the present.
I generally avoid any kind of future thinking. Catastrophizing was our modus operandi throughout my childhood; as a result, when I try to imagine the future, I generally end up in a panic that leaves me unable to do any useful processing. But after finishing the book’s first chapter, where McGonigal outlines the practice, I took a deep breath and dutifully, imagined my ten years older self. Barring death, I supposed she would still be writing, gardening, reading, and being a Spiritual Companion. I didn’t think the Airbnb would be a part of her life, but a space to hold retreats and workshops might. I figured she would be living with a warmer and unpredicatable climate and alongside more climate migrants as a result. She would probably be driving an electric car. I also posited that social and political systems might look very different. As I leaned into what can be very scary scenarios for me, I realized a couple of things: I may actually still be here in ten years (individuals with complex trauma often believe that they will not live very long), I may also be doing meaningful work, and yes, the world may be different in ways that bring me joy, and also in ways that cause me and others suffering, probably both. At the end of the exercise, I felt exhausted, relieved, and surprised. A future me may actually exist beyond the blanket of terror that has blocked my path to her for so long. The practice and its effects feel a bit like prying open an old window, painted shut for too long, and finally, letting a breeze begin to move the heavy air and dust.
What is your relationship with the future? If you decide to try the exercise(s) above and feel comfortable sharing, please do! I’d love to hear the responses of others.
Thanks for the book recommendation, Emily. I'm wondering how it might work in a congregation-wide setting to imagine the future, especially where the majority of people are retired. That is my challenge, getting a group of still capable retirees to imagine a future for the next generation and commit to it, even if it makes them uncomfortable.
Wow. I do have a history of complex trauma and catastrophizing as a method of coping, and did not have resources in my childhood to help me with significant loss and grieving. It's very difficult for me to imagine the future. I relate to "I may actually still be here in ten years" and "A future me may actually exist beyond the blanket of terror that has blocked my path to her for so long." Now that my children are adults, I have been thinking about what I want this next stage of life to be like. I noticed that my motivation for exercising now, so I that I have a chance to be fit and independent in the future, has been affected by not being able to imagine a future. And motivation to save for retirement is another example. I've made it to my middle 50s, and now I'm finally thinking, gosh, I might live awhile, maybe I can start thinking what that might be like! I have also started following some inspiring people on social media who are further along the path than I am, and that's really been helping me to envision some things for my future self/life.