Into The Future!

Meet George Jetson. Jane, his wife. Everyone is smiling. We’re levitating. Or, our food is. Robots are everywhere and they’re smiling. I can’t wait to get there.

Back in the Twentieth Century, we adolescent boomers had not only the world before us, but the future, too. There were no limits to what would be accomplished and everyday would be better than the one before.

The future would hold no end of surprises and improvements. The future would open out limitlessly and, at the end of it, somewhere, was a rainbow or the largest ice cream cone in the universe or something way beyond what we could even begin to imagine. No matter what, it was going to be good. It was exciting.

I’m not so sure, anymore. Have I just gotten older or did something else happen that changed that view?

At my core, I still feel that way – there are no limits to what can be accomplished and there are people, just like me, who are discovering, developing, and creating a future that is exciting and good for everyone.

But something feels different. I used the phrase – in the future - in a letter yesterday and could feel that change. The words are the same, but my idea of the future has been tempered by gray hair, traffic, and weather.

Time passes and, though relative, it’s also, for each of us, finite. As the possibility, the probability, and finally, the inevitability of an end becomes a reality, my idea of the future undergoes radical change.

But, there’s more to it than just my mortality. The population has increased and all those initial realizations and forecasts that had recently begun to surface, when I was young, have become fact. Statistics, though open to interpretation, signal overload. Resources, employment, and psychological stability are under tremendous pressure.

Systems of all sorts and the biggest one of them all – the ecological system – are failing and not moving toward that brighter future. War, political conflict, the decline of natural resources, an outdated educational process, and attacks on reason cast a pall over many things.

This is not the exciting future I was expecting. Where are all the smiling robots? I am able to see now that the older model of the future I had was a passive one. Inaccurate. Unrealistic. I thought the future would stop at the corner and pick me up, as it went by. It may be the passing of time or because of all the information that’s available, but I know now that things don’t work that way.

The future is, and always has been, a function of choice. A function of our individual efforts and imagination. We actually get to choose what that future will be. What each of us does with our time here matters. Our actions determine that future. We can learn from the past and imagine what we want to happen next. We can put our energy behind that. We can see it in whatever way we want.

We can feel what makes us uncomfortable and what makes us hopeful. That’s a choice that shouldn’t be that complicated. Stop or go? Give up or try? Despair or hope? What feels good or what feels bad? Forget about what is possible or not. We won’t know until we try.

The future I want to participate in, exist in, walk into, move into, claim as my own, is one that sparkles. The one that starts again each day. The one I/we get to make. Not the one I’m afraid is going to happen, but the one I want to happen.

In the future, everything will still be a surprise and beyond my imagination, but it will be one that I have a hand in creating. That’s my choice. How this future comes together will always be a mystery, a conundrum, a paradox. It’s the micro and the macro. Individual and inclusive. Here today and here tomorrow. I can’t worry about that.

I’m letting go of that old future. I’ve got a choice and I’m making it. I’m making the future right now. Come on over and we can create it together.