None of us know what is going on.
I’m recalling the words of Jay Springett FRSA from his podcast 301: Permanently moved to online, no 2208: Say Act Feel.
“What can we do about things we can do absolutely nothing about? ..In order to act, one must be sure about how one feels.”
Across our work channels we are supposed to be doing things. Acting. Making. Including *a difference*. When all the signals about the futures ahead of us seem loudly inevitable.
How do you feel about that?
I have felt drained of doish energy, right in the middle of all I am doing.
You?
The Jaymo was first onto my new show Unsee The Future: The Hopeychattybits in which I follow up how to write new stories of us, as the old ones around us burn life and hope. It builds on a UTF intro to Solarpunk – if it’s a genuinely helpful new framework for imagining alternative futures, right when we need such, how do we actually do it?
H O W do we write, make, test, live the new songs and stories of us?
How do little old you and I make life from death?
I’m exploring this first series while simultaneously writing first book – UTF: How to think like an artist and change the world. This is a big question I’m asking of all of us, because why should we imagine we can change the world? As I say in the intro to the whole thing, it sounds infantile to consider such a big act of response.
I feel it’s weight very personally, conscious that I’m not sure I can change a thing about my own life. The little world I live in.
But Jaymo suggests this: “Instead of living in a permanent end time, we must learn to live in the mean time – where we must live with the confusion and make do with partial answers. – a recognition that not one of us knows what the f*** is going on.”
This is responding like an artist. From emotional truth.
As Andy Robinson put it to me on a thread discussing Nora Bateson’s profound episode weighing up how to interact with complexity all around us: “Before you can take positive action to save anything, you first have to grieve. To understand loss. And as I have found personally,” he said, “it is perfectly possible to grieve for something not yet fully lost. And in that place, you can begin.”
My latest guest on The Hopeychattybits is well practised at beginning. Working through. Bringing to life. Founder of the Near Future Laboratory, Julian Bleecker. And his simple call, from a very intersectional creative view of life is:
“I want us to remember we have an imagination… It’s maybe the tool we can use deeply to save ourselves from ourselves.”
We live in the worlds between worlds, as Rina Atienza highlighted in episode 3. None of us know what is going on, but each of us has a truth to follow – a story trail to live into. Learning how to feel that truth’s value can bring light and warmth to you and those near you.
How else do we change worlds?
Where else can we start?
#UnseeTheFuture #Storytelling #crisis #art