We are creatures fascinated with our own story. We obsess and fuss over our history like compulsive librarians, reviewing it over and over. I just watched on TV the dropping of the Times Square ball announcing the new year. Amazingly, that was followed by live footage of people holding up to the camera their cell phone recordings of the event we had just witnessed! Trying not to be alarmed, instead I chose to find it rather sweet. Perhaps this tendency is exemplified in the fact that the entire internet is backed up every few months, dwarfing the whole history of libraries in its doubling of its size every time. I don't claim to understand the reasons, but it at least appears to be a compulsion born of concern– love even– for the daily activity of humanity.
However.
Pivot that perspective around to our future story and almost all that visible concern vanishes. What becomes of that obsessive fixation? Why haven't we even a fraction of that concern for the future? If we did, wouldn't we spend some serious energy making sure the story to come unfolds nicely for our kids? Yet there is so little evidence of such! What gives– do we not really believe in a future? Or we blindly trust that someone will be in charge but we refuse to take responsibility? Instead we seem hell-bent on electing leaders who give cheap assurances in place of the real work of pursuing a bright future. The human experiment appears doomed! Is it made so by simple lack of the one thing that brought us to the evolutionary peak: imagination?...So anyway what did you do for New Years?
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