#possiblefutures

[thedtomas]

Social Unrest 2/10/18

Our feeble minds can't process the spectrum of which our god emits. A raging fireball that sustains life and so too shall take away. Celestial king of the humanoids, reigning over uprights since inception.

Coronal Mass Ejection at hyper speed, with no intention annihilates our way of life. Black outs plague the day. No power, assets or one to blame. Electromagnetic time machine reverting us back to the stone age. Mass hysteria fear driven delirium. Loss of communications. Scrambling for defensive positions. Armed to the teeth. Gun fire in self defense, explosions and car wrecks anarchy in the streets. Robbing and killing and looting and pillaging. Destruction in the streets. Millions exodus leaving their homes in panic. Safety is lock down wait it out. Until they all kill themselves.

14 days of absolute hell. 50% of the world is dead. Take in a whiff of that pungent smell. Cities on fire burnt to the ground.

The religious scold their God. Screaming out to the smoke filled skies. Begging why? No end in sight.

The government dispatches droves of souls too restore order. Guerilla warfare door to door. Herding survivors into corrals like livestock. Disgusting conditions. Nightmare. Don't question marshal law.

The elderly, the disabled, the diseased, the resistance, agitators all shot dead in the streets. No empathy, no sympathy, no mercy, no sentiment, no compassion, no humanity.

365 days since the airwaves went silent Five and a half Billion souls have forcefully passed. The power is restored. The living are released and told to carry on. With the blood of yesterday still wet on our hands. What can we learn from this?

Humanity is weak and full of hate. Hoard ammo, supplies and a faraday cage. 🤘🏻

[sahana2802]

A New Story

As the world literally burns around us, we have to admit that we have brought ourselves to the brink of everything. The narratives, structures, and perceptual framings that we had assumed and accepted as the 'way things are' have fallen apart. We don’t yet have a credible, alternative, collective narrative that can help us to reimagine a new world – a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. 

We are now residing in a place between stories – a liminal space filled with possibilities, potentials, and promise. We don’t yet know the exact outline of the New Story. But we can sense and feel the seeds; we know that the soil is being prepared; we recognize that we all have a part to play. It is up to each one of us to be heralds and emissaries of the new story – a story founded on us reclaiming our humanity, recognizing our interconnectedness, regaining our agency, authenticity, and wholeness.

The new story calls for a collective awakening, of making choices that will emanate from a shift in consciousness and impact every aspect of our existence – social, political, economics, ecological, and spiritual. It is no longer about individual preferences or even the choices of a handful of organizations. 

For this collective shift to happen, we must move from a Story of Separation to a Story of Interbeing.

Charles Eisenstein puts is beautifully when he says:

“Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?”

[sahana2802]

Befriending Uncertainty

To fully step into this liminal space of uncertainty-- embodying potential, possibilities, power-- and to become stewards of a new way of being on this planet, we must befriend and welcome the uncertain, the unknown, the ambiguous. Only by learning to dwell in this liminal space with gentle curiosity can we actualize the future that wants to emerge through us.

None of us have a map to this unknown world. I have tried to distill some core qualities we need to embark on this voyage as compass…

Staying with uncertainty and ambiguity is a core leadership skill today. Leaders no longer need to have all the answers but must be able to hold space for the questions, become wayfinders and stewards to usher in and manifest a world that works for all.

[sahana2802]

Radical Renewal: The Way Forward

Human beings are psychologically addicted to predictability. We prefer to be cushioned by the mundane ordinariness of life rather than dwell in the discomfort of the unknown. We will grab at any distraction to escape the awful, hollow, and helpless void of the unknown. 

With the onset of the pandemic, our routes of distraction have been snatched away without any promise of return. What we have been offered instead are revelations into the fault lines and inequalities in our societies we would rather not see; exposures to the absurd and ludicrous ineptness of governance that leave us stupefied; and experiences of the creaking and collapsing public infrastructures that are woefully inadequate in meeting the demands of the moment. And the exposure to the brutal and unimaginable divide between the top 1% and the bottom 50% of the world’s population. 

The virus has laid bare the pervasive brokenness we had papered over for far too long in their shameful, pitiful, and burning details. Our privilege is no longer our refuge. Our privilege now bestows on us a grave responsibility. A grave responsibility to reclaim our humanity and all it entails—compassion, care, empathy, connection, justice, equality, and dignity for all. A responsibility to remove the viciousness of social pathologies where we have lost touch with our own humanity in the pursuit of power, profit, privilege, pleasure, and political perversions. It is our opportunity to heal ourselves and our only home.    

Vaclav Havel said, “The main task in the coming era is… a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility… for ourselves and for the world.” https://citizenstout.substack.com/p/care-connects-us-all

[sahana2802]

Holding the Questions

What would a world where all sentient beings and the Planet flourished feel like?

How would it feel if our inextricable interdependencies and interconnectedness were deeply honored in all our decisions—social, economic, political, and spiritual?

How would we behave if we could touch the profound core of our entanglement with each other and the Planet?

How would we reimagine a world where the unheard, the unseen, the disavowed are no longer invisibilized and delegitimized? Where humanity is not divided into hierarchies…

What do we need to imagine a world where we hold space for each other in fearless, generative dialogues of possibilities? 

[sahana2802]

Radical Tenderness

In a 2015 Manifesto called Radical Tenderness, Dani d’Emilia and Daniel B. Chávez writes: “radical tenderness is to not collapse in the face of our contradictions… is to have peripheral vision; to believe in what cannot be seen.”

The words are hauntingly evocative, prophetic, and profound. The chaos and conflicts threatening us daily are overwhelming, and it is easy to sink into despair and a desperate yearning for some semblance of stability and certainty.

The pandemic, however, can be a portal towards a regenerative future inviting us to hospice what no longer works, and to midwife the new. If only we can “believe in what cannot be seen”.

For the full article: Reimagining a Regenerative Future-Part 1

The questions we ask today will define our tomorrows...

[sahana2802]

Beyond ‘isms’ and Dogmas

Beyond isms, ideologies, and dogmas, which are really levers of oppression, lie the narratives of humanity—pluriversal, inter-related, contextual, and emergent. 

This evolutionary shift is already underway. The future exists in the present. The reimagining and envisioning of a different future are happening. Everywhere. In visible and invisible ways. In the fringes and margins. 

But no longer contained and confined to the peripheries; they are spilling over into the heart of society, erupting like shoots of hope amidst forces of destruction and decay. Forcing us to see and acknowledge the unseen, unheard, untold, and unrecognized narratives that contradict the constructed reality of mainstream propaganda.

[sahana2802]

A pluriversal world embraces different cosmologies and ontologies, and avoids the traps of a single story. The hegemony of a universal narrative that disavows and invisibilizes myriad ways of being and relating cannot be the foundation of a regenerative future.