Engaging an Uncertain Future: An Imagination and Design Challenge | Global Connections Call Notes 11.7.2024
The November Global Connections Call with Kern Beare was a beautiful opportunity for participants to come together and reflect on the impact of recent US elections, emphasizing the need to build bridges and understand diverse perspectives. Kern led a discussion on imagining a better future, highlighting the importance of empathy, compassion, and addressing existential crises like climate change and political instability. This month’s call was a workshop format that included several small group discussion opportunities. We explored our inherited beliefs, current realities, and future visions, stressing the need for systemic change and collective action to navigate crisis and conflict. Kern encouraged us to embrace accelerated imagination and design to manifest a future world illuminated by compassion and resilient joy. Please click here for a link to the call recording.
Welcome
Hollister: I think it's always important for us to start these conversations with a moment to ground in together. It always feels important, and this morning feels especially important to be insistent on unification and community. I’m happy to unite with you all in a moment of quiet. To set us up for a moment of quiet reflection, I'm going to read an excerpt from Sonya Renee Taylor's poem entitled, “Continue.” It feels really relevant and important.
Continue to do the good work
continue to build bridges, not walls
Continue to lead with compassion
Continue the demanding work of liberation for all
Continue to dismantle broken systems large and small
Continue to set the best example for the children
Continue to be a vessel of nourishing joy
Continue right where you are, right where you live into your days. Do so in the name of the Creator who expects nothing less from each of us.
I didn’t sleep more than 30 minutes last night, so I've had a lot of time to be in deep prayer, listening and reflection. What has become increasingly clear to me, in this year of elections around the world is that this is not this is not a unique place that the United States is in. I've been thinking a lot about how elections are not solutions, and they're not the solvers of division and chaos and uncertainty. This year I’ve been thinking a lot about how often elections actually expose our mistrust in ourselves and in others, at least from my perspective. I know in the darkness of the night, I had a moment where I was like, well, maybe I'm not right and maybe prayer is futile. Maybe my instincts and observations are wrong. I thought “Oh, that's so interesting.” The seed of mistrust is planted first in myself. And then I moved my mistrust to the other, and then back and forth again. The key observation I made in that moment is naming an “other.” And so the question I began to ask myself over and over again is, can I, can we, fundamentally change how I see the other?
This is the work that we are doing as a Euphrates community, a global community who recognizes that elections aren't the great solvers and that the work of building bridges and turning the other into a brother or sister is the most important work we can do.
I'd like to invite our founder, Janessa Gans Wilder, to help us further ground into this call and introduce us to Kern and talk about why this call, this opportunity with Kern, is such a perfectly timed opportunity for us to gather together.
Introduction
Janessa: Here we are again. I was with Kern in 2016 the night of the election. We were on a retreat with a small group in Lake Tahoe, California. My oldest daughter was three years old at the time, and I remember going to bed that night so elated that my daughter would never know a country that didn't have a woman president. Then we woke up the next morning with very different news. The whole schedule that we had planned for that day was scrapped, and Kern facilitated an incredible session of processing all that was coming up.
And then fast forward to today. [My daughter’s] now 11. She was just so confused. She was like, “well, when was it decided that men are the ones in charge.” It's interesting, you know, hearing her reaction to that.
Following that 2016 election, at that time, for many of us, it was a time of confusion and even in some cases, despair. Instead of resorting to that, to a sense of helplessness or judgment or blame, Kern and his son embarked on a cross country national tour to listen to America. They went across the country, hamlets and villages, to understand, to inquire, to be with people, to sit with them. And so that incredible listening tour that they embarked upon evolved into this project that Kern has turned into a workshop, a book, and a podcast. It's called Difficult Conversations. How do we not run away from those difficult conversations? But how do we have them? They are absolutely vital for everyone in this country. You cannot shy away from difficult conversations and how to prioritize the relationship in those conversations.
I knew that in my own community here in Northern California, that difficult conversations that were not happening, needed to be happening. There were increasing silos in the community, decisions weren't being made, and attacks were being levied. The local government here was not working. So a few of us had the idea to host a series of workshops up here in Redding California. Imagine a room with 80 people from every faction you can imagine, and people who, in many cases, had not spoken to each other in a long time. The workshop provided a space for, everyone and then it gave us a common language around how to talk about topics that are very difficult and very emotional and and ground them, and actually listen and understand that the body might be in fight or flight mode, but we can still be together, and that what matters is our connection and our relationship. I can give you so many examples of the ripple effect that it had locally.
This is my background with Kern. He's just come in to save the day several times in difficult moments. It's incredible timing that here we are again, the day after an election with Kern. This is exciting because I think this workshop is new! Thank you for being with us today, of all days.
Workshop Transcript
Thank you to everybody here. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for allowing me to have this time with you. I really very much appreciate it. It's already easy to feel disconnected when you're looking through a computer screen, but being able to see people's faces and smiles and expressions is a gift to everybody.
As Janessa mentioned at the end, this really isn't part of my work on difficult conversations. I'm actually doing something a little bit experimental with you all. And before I get into that, we're going to divide into groups of four, and just give people an opportunity to share with each other how they're doing and where they are. If you're from the US you might be a little unsettled perhaps by the election outcome, but I think all of us in whatever environment we are in, are experiencing challenges of various types, so it's nice just to share, where are you, how are you feeling? What's your state of being?
Breakout
I hope that was a nice check in. It's always good just to connect with people and have a chance to share where we are. We're going to be breaking into small groups quite a bit in this next hour that we have together.
I would say that the focus of the conversation, ultimately, is an imagination exercise, to think about the kind of world we really want. And to do that, it's helpful to start with the world we have, and then to move through a sequence of questions. I'm going to introduce some content, I'm going to offer some questions. We're going to have a short amount of time to actually engage in the questions. I think we'll do about five or six minutes each time, just so you know that this is the accelerated part, because we only have an hour. It'll give us a taste of what could be, perhaps something to come back to and to use as a thinking exercise at another time.
This is an invitation to engage in an accelerated imagination and design challenge. I love this quote by Ian McGilchrist, he wrote a book called The Matter With Things. “Imagination widens the flashlight that makes things visible.” That imagination isn't just a chance to think about things that are completely outside the question of what is really possible. It's really trying to imagine what is possible, but what we haven't quite yet seen is possible, possibility that we haven't seen. How do we learn to reveal that [possibility] so that we can live into it?
The context that I would like to set forth is to acknowledge that we live in a time of existential crises, and we know what they are. We have the crisis of climate change and all the things that relate to that, the fires, the water shortage, the loss of topsoil, right, all of these things that are changing the planet and the natural system upon which we depend. We see it internationally with conflict, conflict that has the risk of accelerating to the level where all life is at risk. We have mass extinctions. We have disruptive political events that add to our sense of feeling that things are not the way they have normally been, and we're wondering what's going on. So not, not to be a downer here, but just to acknowledge that this is quite a unique time in the human journey, and to really take it in.
When life hits a crisis point, we know from our evolutionary story that things change. It's not you know, dinosaurs, boom, more dinosaurs. That's not what happened, right? It was dinosaurs. Boom, something really different, right? The dinosaurs went extinct, the mammals started to appear and kind of carry on the evolutionary journey that led to us. But this is really not how most people are thinking. Most people are thinking life as we know it -> major crises -> life as we knew it. We're not really thinking collectively at a very systemic level about what really needs to change. We think we're still going to be able to pretty much live life as we have known it, with some adaptation. We'll figure it out. We don't really have to question our most basic assumptions. We don't really have to question our most basic institutions. We don't really have to question our fundamental values. We're not really collectively right. We're not thinking that - we get very distracted. In the US we get very worked up about Trump, but we're not really addressing what is it that gave rise to what is happening now? What has given rise to climate change? What really is off about the way human beings participate? So really, we're in this mode of dinosaurs and more dinosaurs. We're not thinking.
This is a proposition for you. We're not really thinking clearly. But if the more likely scenario is life as we know it -> major crises -> something really different…think reptiles to mammals, different. Then the question is different. As we move through this time of existential crises, what could be different, and what do we need to do? Who do we need to be to live into what we could imagine to be a new way of relating to each other, of relating to the planet, of relating to the future? So this is our design challenge.
For round one, I want to start with a quote. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.” That's Dougal Hein from a book called At Work in the Ruins. So our first small group reflection, we're going to look back to life as we as we know it now, but we're going to pretend we're looking backward, looking back at life as we knew it, reflect on the dominant ways of thinking that got us into these crises. So as you're looking back at the world today, looking back at the present time, we're looking backward at the present, what did we think we knew? Who did we think we were? Where did we think we were headed? We're going to break into groups and just share our thoughts about looking back and looking at these questions.
Breakout Session 1
What we want to do now is really take in the present moment and try to in your mind, immerse yourself in what it is like to be alive right now, the realities that we are confronting, the preoccupations that we have, the challenges that we're facing, so to place yourself fully within the current moment, taking the full impact of our many challenges. What is this moment teaching us from the vantage point of what we are going through right now? What do we think we know now? Who do we think we are now, and how might our answers help us navigate our way forward? And the “we” here is the collective, the best we can speak to our collective mindset. What new knowledge is emerging now, what new understanding of who we are is emerging now, and how might our answers help us navigate our way forward? So we're going to go back into, I imagine, different groups of four.
Breakout Session 2
So we've looked back, we've looked at the current major like the present, being in the crises, and now we want to look at life as we know it. Now we're going to put ourselves into the future. Imagine we successfully emerged from our crises and are living in a different way. What way is that now? These are big questions - what have we carried forward from life as we knew it, and what have we left behind? What insights have we had that changed what we thought was possible for humankind? What skills, practices or ways of being that were once considered fringe or unrealistic are now seen as essential? What have we carried forward from life as we knew it? What is it about the way we live now, the way we think now, the way we interact now, that we think is good and we want to continue that, and what would we leave behind? What have we seen in ourselves that give us confidence of who we can become, and what skills, practices or ways of being that were once considered fringe or unrealistic are now seen as essential? There are many things that have wisdom that have been lost through the ages, that have not made their way into the modern world as we know it. What might we now look at and say that we need to bring forward? Do your best with these questions. We're going to again break into our small group discussion.
Breakout Session 3
I hope and have to trust that you’re finding these conversations worthwhile to have. The very last time we’re going to break up into groups is to address this last question. As a preface this quote, “Imagine our world beginning to heal and regenerate…a future where we live a different way…what way is that? That is a question for an imagination exercise…but it needs to be a world we can live in now…expressed through each of us as individuals, which is the only way it can be expressed.” [Ian McGilchrist] I can tell that this attitude is embedded in this community of people here, the people who are part of the conversation right now. I know this is very consistent at the heart of your work. If it’s not alive in us now, the qualities that we want to see in the world, the emerging world as we come out of our challenges. If it’s not embedded in us now, it’s not going to be there later. Reflect on and share how, at this critical time, you are an expression of “life as it could be.”
Breakout Session 4
I want to say thank you for engaging. This was an experiment. This was a wonderful opportunity and a beautiful group to try it with. My underlying objective is that I believe we are heading in for increasingly challenging times and to remember we have agency. [As my friend Tom shared] It can be easy to go into fear and to retreat and to forget how much agency we have. How we engage in the world makes a huge difference and I know that this is the heart of what Euphrates is all about. This was an uplifting experience for me.
Hollister: Thank you Kern. I appreciate what you named in this moment. I appreciate the power of imagination and how important it is to help us move forward. I hope you found moments of hope and appreciation for each other in your rooms. I’m grateful for the reminder of agency because when you’re by yourself in your room, in your corner of the world, it’s easy to forget. I’m grateful we could come together. It truly is a part of the mission of Euphrates to equip, connect, and uplift ourselves first and then each other and then in community. And this is truly how we see change happening in the world.