18 Mar The future should be ridiculous
Okay. Let’s take a poll.
When you think about the future what is your default feeling, thought, belief?
If someone asks you (like I am right now) what do you think will happen in your future…how would you respond? What happens in your heart, mind and body perhaps even before words start forming? Do you have a time frame for “future”?
What if I was more specific: What do you think will be your situation in 10 years?
What then? What images? Hopes? Concerns? Dreams come up for you?
Why am I asking you this?
I was reading some research which got me thinking about healing and wondering what people say at the beginning of their healing, what they’d consider in the midst of it all, and if there’s a perspective change when we’ve rounded a corner.
It’s also top of mind as I prepare for a retreat that happens tomorrow. We’re going to be doing some future molding, looking into opening up possibilities in each person’s future.
I’m going to be leading with Dator’s Law: “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”
Well, THAT caught me in my tracks. What we envision SHOULD be ridiculous. Hmmmm.
What’s that about?
Perspective changing, which is what Dator’s Law invites us to do, is shift out of what we are habituated to think…towards something (entirely) else.
It’s meant to catch us off guard.
It’s meant to explore those habitual responses we all have to something “preposterous.”
Instead of saying, “That’s ridiculous, that could never happen.” Or, while shaking our head, “I can’t imagine that”…what if we paused.
And then investigated a bit further to see if this thing that could never be, might be possible.
Any idea, especially those ridiculous ones can be useful to spark creativity, innovation and orient us out of habitual patterns.
“Ridiculous” scenarios help us think of things we’ve never thought of before.
We know from the science that any story we tell ourselves creates a specific response in the brain.
Some propose that we tell ourselves catastrophic stories about the future so that we won’t be shocked but rather prepared. The more time we spend in the catastrophy, the more prepared we are for the feelings of helplessness and fear. That may or may not be safe for you…or perhaps that’s precisely the pattern you’re trying to shift…
Soooooo…. What if we told ourselves different stories? Took different perspectives?
That’s what the Becoming Safely Embodied skills are about. In fact, there’s a couple skills dedicated to just this very thing.
Angus Fletcher, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of storytelling on the brain, describes it like this: “Foreknowledge stimulates a powerful sensation of cosmic irony in the ‘perspective-taking network’ of our brain’s prefrontal cortex, giving us a godlike experience” as we see events from afar, or from above.
Foreknowledge (like “a tale told from our future”) triggers a mindset shift. It’s a sense of deja-vu.
Fletcher continues, “This God’s-Eye vantage reduces activity in our brain’s deep emotion zones, acting as a neural shock absorber against the traumatic events before us…. [shifting] our tragic feeling of helplessness into a psychological sensation of helpfulness.”
Here’s your homework:
Who will you be in 10 years time?
Where will you live?
Who will be there with you? Will you live alone? Live in community? With just one person?
What will you be reading? Watching? Doing?
How will you get around in the world?
If you want a downloadable handout to help you in “Reauthoring Your Story”, click here.