Falling in Love with the Future.

Whenever Becky does a chore she doesn’t feel like doing, she often says, “Future Becky will thank me.”

The next day, upon discovering the hay bags have been filled or the corral has been mucked, you’ll likely hear her say aloud, “Thanks, Past Becky.”

Small joke. Not a small act of love for the future.

Our problems are many. Or as we say these days, ours is a polycrisis. Wicked problems encased in a nasty thicket of systems. It would be easy (and it sometime is) to fall in love with the problems. To see everywhere the cracks.

And.

There are many possible futures. In many of them, we get things right. Our organizations contribute rather than extract. Our leaders heal rather than harm. Our teams dream together. Our technology enables human thriving.

Signs of that future are already visible.

> Yesterday I talked with an influential business leader in Europe. We chatted trends and transformations. He said without question the dominant theme among his executive peers is recovering *passion.*

> Last week I joined a webinar with 20+ folks from around the world to talk about recovering *imagination.*

>>> Yesterday, I joined a cohort writing personal manifestos by first launching ourselves a year into the future to *vision* what we had become.

>>> Over the weekend, we hosted a sold-out, energetic event that was simply about the embracing of *gratitude.*

Are these trends? Maybe. Hopefully? But first they’re longings. Falling in love with the future.

Back in my seminary days, I fell into a kind of love with Kierkegaard. He offers a strange and beautiful inversion of how we usually think about time. We usually think of knowledge as recollection. You know, looking backward to recover what already happened. But K proposed the inverse is true too: we can "recollect forward.” A future well-prepared for feels like return. Something we move toward and also somehow already know.

A kind of “remembering the future.”

In a book we’re reading here, Rob Hopkins says something similar: if you suspend your worries about the future long enough to mentally inhabit and then describe a world your are thrilled to be a part of, it begins to feel like somewhere you've already been.

The first line on our website says: “We’ve Been to Tomorrow.” In a way, we have. As we partner with our national, international, non-profit clients, we are frame our work not as simply solving problems. We're building for Tomorrow. Falling in love with the future.

A few years ago, on a windy winter day. We’re driving through rolling farmland. Becky mused, "What if we built a place that shows folks a different way is possible, then teaches them how to build it?"

Thanks, Past Becky.