The Shapes of Time

The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. William Gibso

How we shape our attention determines outcomes. Otto Scharmer

The gathering consisted of 21 family members, the executive director of the family foundation and a few key family advisors. Everyone was eager to find out what the future would hold for the family. To date, the family had made good progress, and there were also some points at which they were quite stuck. Our goal for the weekend was to find a path for real progress.

I began the retreat with the two quotes cited above. I suggested to the group that within the room, in the present moment, were all of the seeds for multiple potential futures. I proposed that the future was, in a sense, already here. I also suggested that how they paid attention to the present would shape the future. This kind of attention required them to scan the present situation for potential clues to various possible scenarios that could happen. I noted that, from my experience, these “seeds” of the future were not evenly distributed. Some seeds were large and obvious, some were sprouting and some dormant, and some were small and quite subtle.

I suggested that each person had different but quite valuable information about these various futures. And finally, that their individual and collective ways of observing and perceiving these clues were not evenly distributed across the group, which in turn meant that valuable information had to be uncovered through deep listening and open dialogue.

While all of this could have seemed abstract, it immediately resonated with the group, and as we worked through the day, we uncovered four quite distinct paths forward, all of which were rooted in present “facts on the ground” but, depending on what was consciously curated, would take the family in radically disparate directions.

This question of time is a question every family must deal with. As human beings, we tend to view the past as fixed and view the future as uncertain and infinitely variable. Yet more and more neither of these propositions seems entirely true.

Perhaps the easier entry point into this question of time lies in the examination of the “past”. The “past”, of course, does not “exist” except in the form of individual and collective mental constructs we call memories. (It may have existed as a concrete reality at one point, but it certainly does not exist in that same way now – even five minutes ago is no longer what is real.) We remember selectively, and ample research shows that our memories shift over time as new experiences modify what we remember. Our minds are not like videotape or photographs. They are not faithful recordations of the experiences of our lives. They are far more plastic than that. The past is an evolving story.

In this sense, human memory is more impressionistic than it is representational. This non-existence of the past except as pliable memory has profound implications. Families that can create new meaning – who can manage and actively shape their collective memory - actually change that memory and its meaning in both the individuals and the family as a whole. History, in this sense, is not destiny. Indeed “history” is not even fixed. It is fluid. Through work in the present, we can alchemically shift “history” in ways that are more conducive to our own growth and development. There are, of course, limits to this – our neural pathways are often quite set, and the memories are, thankfully and quite usefully, persistent – but there is also a great deal of wiggle room in this work. Shifting family narratives actually changes not only the present experience of things, but also alters the “past” itself (keeping in mind that the “past,” after all, is merely an idea with no independent, non-contingent existence beyond the memory in the presently constituted human mind).

Perhaps more controversial is the notion that the future is accessible in the present. There are deep questions in philosophy and physics about the direction of time. Why is that we experience only a forward progression of events? Such questions are the province of quantum mechanics and the architecture of the world of particles, Planck lengths and vacuums. No one has truly solved the issue of the arrow of time, but it seems axiomatic to our experience that linearity is how we experience the world (at least in our normal waking state). That said, under some credible theories of a holographic universe, there is some reason to believe that the future is not merely figuratively present, but actually present as part of the fabric of what we experience as the present moment of “real” existence.

Experientially, it seems that there are ways in which the felt sense of the future is known somatically, subconsciously and, at times, even consciously. By shaping individual and collective attention, it is possible to do more than merely guess at the future; it is also possible to tap into a kind of sensory knowing of variable outcomes. As Otto Scharmer suggests, when we approach the world not merely with an open mind and an open heart, but an open will, we can be liberated to begin to “act from the emerging whole”.

This is not mere guesswork – it is a kind of knowing, giving rise to emotions of tentative certainty. This concrete emergence of the future (and its tendrils in the present) is no more fixed than memory is, but it is accessible and can actually be brought forth with a kind of radical openness and an attention to the future. This requires that we pay very close attention to how that future is already here, but just not evenly distributed. In this sense, as Scharmer suggests, how we shape our attention actually shapes the outcome. In this sense the future is adumbrated in the present.

This is not to say – as some New Age philosophies would have it - that what we think becomes reality, but rather that future possibility and even the trajectory of the history of tomorrow can be expanded or contracted quite precisely and concretely by how we pay attention in the present. Clues to possible futures are littered around us in sublte realms of intuition, feeling and imagination. To the extent that we can collectively focus our attention broadly, to feel the shape and substance of these emergent futures, we create the preconditions for more liberating futures that admit greater human and cultural potential. By contracting our attention, we limit those possibilities through failures of imagination and curation

.For those of us who are working with clients and with families, these questions of sensitivity to time – past, present and future – can become a fertile ground to movement from merely the provision of services in the face of unknowable risk and uncertainty to moving into more trusted and more effective engagement that works creatively with the plasticity of time.

© 2015. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.