Imagine That
In which I give a workshop, the scientists scoff, but the community activists have my back -- and yours. (So does Tom Hanks.)
The week before the 2020 lockdown began, I gave a workshop at a climate change conference and I talked — as I always do — about the need for hope. The attendees were an interesting group, about one third scientists (all white, all urban); and two thirds community activists, who were predominantly either Latinx, Native American or Black, most of them from smaller, rural, impoverished communities.
One man, a scientist from the Seattle-Tacoma area, expressed frustration at my argument that people respond best to narratives that find purpose and meaning in the midst of hardship. This is a man who makes a living in large part speaking to communities about climate change; he is in the struggle every day.
“Yeah, I do it,” he said. “I know I have to be — “ and here he put his fingers up in air quotes — “hopeful. But the truth is, I’m just lying to people.”
If you ask what keeps me up at night, what demons drive me out of sleep, well, here he is, in this story taking the form of a progressive scientist from Seattle.
He doesn’t look like a monster because he’s clearly not one. He’s smart, he cares about the same things I do, his opinion and his beliefs are hard earned and deserve respect.
I also am not totally kidding when I say this scientist, and the legions of people like him, are the greatest existential threat to our survival.
Success starts with the stories you tell, but so does disaster, and honestly, our stories scare the hell out of me. Our stories keep me up at night.
Because as I’ve been saying all year, the stories we tell have a tendency to come true. And so what happens when we tell a story without hope? What happens when we obsessively imagine the abyss?
I want to be super clear. I’m not advocating that we never feel hopeless. That would be impossible, and also counter productive. Hopeless is a natural feeling. It washes over us in response to the horrors of the world; we are human, so of course when we look at the map of the world and see a wave of scorching red heat, when we witness the horrors in Israel and Gaza, at what is happening to children; when our government has unraveled to the point where Congress cannot even operate, it would be insulting to say don’t feel hopeless. It would be like asking you to stand in front of a tsunami and not get wet.
Hopeless as a feeling is unavoidable, a natural human response to immense suffering. But hopeless as a felling is different from hopeless as a story.
Hopeless as a feeling says this is how I feel right now.
Hopeless as a story says and it will only get worse from here.
Hopeless as a story is something that we carry into the future.
Hopeless, the story, that is a threat to our survival.
Hopeless, the story, that is what keeps me up at night.
It is so tempting — so incredibly tempting — to live in this world, and to not just feel hopeless, but to commit to it. To say, welcome to the abyss, this is where we live now, it only goes down from here.
But the thing is, there is another way. And there are people who have lived in the abyss longer than we have, who are showing us the other way, if we would only listen.
The Other Way
At the climate change workshop, as the scientists scowled, another group had my back. A couple from Navajo Nation, and a older Latina woman, and an Alaskan Native, they bobbed their heads all the way through. They had much to say, to teach me and all of us, about what hope in a hard world looks like.
“Our people are incredibly resilient,” said one of the activists. She represents an Alaskan Native community that, because of climate change, has lost all access to safe water.
Not may lose. Has lost. The population of this community has no access to safe water. The stronger members of their community, primarily their young men, have to physically transport safe water into their homes, and then haul human waste out again. This community is experiencing real health impacts as a result.
But when this woman spoke, she spoke not about hopelessness or despair, but about awakening to a fight.
“(Over the years) we had come to accept this lifestyle, even though it’s unjust,” she said. “You can let all of this create disaster. Or you can let it create energy for something different.”
The Navajo leader was himself a storyteller, so he understood the power of narrative for survival, and for transformation. He spoke eloquently about the need to keep going, to believe in the future, even though the land his tribe is living on as been literally destroyed. The soil is dead, so he is working on a project to restore it; to renew the soil on which they live so his people can return to the way of life that has sustained them for hundreds of generations before. He does not have many resources, so he knows how important it is to keep every one he has.
The people who took their land have stolen so much from his tribe, he says. “We cannot let them steal our imagination. We must imagine our way forward.”
Hopeless as a feeling is inevitable. But hopeless as a narrative?
That’s a choice, and we can make another one. And it begins with imagination.
Scientists have talked about imagination as a critical tool in easing our hopes and fears. This is where stories play such a critical role: stories literally imagine a better world, and show it to us. Storytellers ask us to think not about what is, but about what was, and what could one day be. In this sense they are not just our storytellers; they are our architects, building the infrastructure for a different future long before we ever get to it. This is what it will look like, they say to us, helping us to think about what it might look like to us.
If revolution is an act of competitive storytelling (and it is), where the best story about the future becomes the future (and it does), then it is all of our responsibility to tell really good stories about what we are going through right now.
The writer Chinua Achebe knows something about this. He lived through Africa’s deeply traumatic path to independence, and in the midst of those horrors, this is what he wrote:
If you look at this very small segment of history….If you are frozen in time, you can say yes, it’s awful. And it is really awful. But I think if you take the wide view of things, then you begin to see it as history, as human history over a long period of time, and that we are passing through a bad patch. It’s not death. We are passing through a bad patch, and if we succeed, then even this experience of the bad patch will turn out to be an enrichment.
— Chinua Achebe
And this is the good news, this is the best news, this is where hope comes from, for me, so much of the time, when I feel hopeless, because of course I do, of course I get knocked down when the tsunami hits.
So much of the world we cannot change. But our stories? Our stories always can.
We all are called on to imagine our way forward.
We are all called on feel despair, and then to go the other way.
A Rugged Imagination
So as we navigate our way through these hard times, I encourage all of us to cultivate a rugged imagination. What is it to have a rugged imagination?
It is to own our story, even the hard parts. It is to accept the suffering, to face our adversaries, and to still have the imagination to create a better future.
It is to recognize the essential paradox of all of life: that we have setbacks before transformation, that we will face hardships on the road to redemption.
A rugged imagination does not say this will be easy. A rugged imagination channels Tom Hanks in League of Their Own .
A rugged imagination is what Churchill used to lead the Allies through the darkest days of World War II, when he turned to face the most terrifying reality imaginable and said “This will be our finest hour.”
A rugged imagination does not say, there will be no suffering. It says this suffering will not last forever.
A rugged imagination does not say, everything happens for a reason. It says we will make meaing from everything that happens.
A rugged imagination says, this land is dead, but it can be brought back to life, and in fact, it is. In fact, regenerative agriculture is showing great promise in reversing climate change, and it began as all movements do, with just a few people saying, in the face of devastating loss, we shall not give in to despair, we shall imagine our way forward.
The future is an act of competitive storytelling, my friends. We all are imagining the future that will arise from this time we are living in now. Build a practice of rugged imagination, and tell great stories, and tell true stories, and help write our way towards a better ending.
Perhaps it feels that we are living in a time of monsters. Monsters in charge of our government, monsters whose greed is destroying the fabric of our democracy, monsters of racism and misogyny and fear.
Perhaps in their presence, we can find the purpose to be not destroyed, but energized. Perhaps in their presence we can find a sense of purpose, as simple as the strength to face the world with joy and hope amidst uncertainty, or as powerful as being part of the movement like the women who fought on the home front in World War II.
Perhaps we are meant to be shaken out of our long complacency, fueled by decades of peace and prosperity unseen in human history, to be called into battle.
Perhaps we will find the strength, because we must find the strength, to address generations of inequity and imbalance in how we treat each other and the world we share.
Perhaps we will become more grateful, more kind, more determined.
Perhaps we will come to understand that no matter who we elect, no President can save us, because no one person can ever save us, because our job and our deepest calling is to save each other.
Perhaps decades from now, at the end of our long and useful lives, we will look back on these tumultuous times, and we will remember the days of the coronavirus and climate change and the incredible cruelty that we rose up together to fight, and we will tell the historians who ask us about it, it was the most important time of my life.
Imagine that.
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This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter (almost) every week.
Excellent post, thank you. I appreciate the mention of the climate scientist’s attitude. As a scientist myself, I struggle with the zeitgeist of doom many of my colleagues seem to have committed themselves to. It has become extremely counterproductive and I try to push against/question it at every opportunity in my work.
I liked what you said about everything happens (not) for a reason. I liked the whole thing! Thank you so much! I am re-energized after listening to this.