Imagining Our Future

Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver

In our May 9th Saturday Sabbath broadcast, you were invited to practice prospection. Here you can share what your prospection brought to you.

Prospection is the uniquely human talent to imagine multiple futures and then to work toward one. Similar to the word "prospecting," it is a spiritual practice of investing in the future by mining the golden nuggets of the past. 

Prospection is a newly developing neurological study of the connection of our memories and our ability to envision a one future among many and make plans to make it happen. There is clear evidence that within our minds the past and the future overlap. 

First comes thought; then organization of that thought
into ideas and plans;
then transformation
​of those plans into reality.
​
The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
- Napoleon Hill

Below are the steps to practice prospection and the opportunity to share what has come to you once you are finished.

Will all that is shared here be optimistic?  It is unlikely, we UUs are not prone to always seeing the glass as half full. Yet, as a people of faith, we not overly pessimistic that the glass is half empty. Instead, we hold complexity among us: the glass is, and the liquid is, and people are thirsty.

Let us hold all that is shared among us and quench each other's thirst with our imagining the future together.

Prospection & Sharing

There are seven steps to prospection and each feels necessary within the vast unpredictability of the world we live in.

Take each at your personal pace:

1. Breathe deeply and open yourself to something you enjoyed doing a year ago. It can be anything that made you happy, but had to occur exactly one year ago from your reading of this. Be as precise to the time and place as possible.

2. Revisit that time in your memory in as much detail as you can. What can you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell? Rest within this memory for as long as you like.

3. When you are ready, pick a date on the calendar one year from now. Choose a similar place and the time of day to the memory you enjoyed, the more precise you are the better. 

4. While you could simply recall your memory from a year ago and imprint it on a year from now, you are invited to create a new memory of the future. (You are wise enough to know that things change, and wise enough to know that they also stay the same.) Prospection invites you to welcome all the changes that occur over the years, just as it invites you to bring the past along with you.

5. Breathe deeply and open yourself up to the future one year from now. Invite yourself to explore all the sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells that surround you. The more details you can imagine the better. Be within this future memory as long as you like. 

6. When you are ready, answer a one or all of these questions for yourself: What did I imagine my future to be? What changes do I imagine I will have lived through? What details or image stood out for me? How is the future I imagine similar to my past? How unique do I imagine my future to be? 

7. While you can repeat these steps with different past and future memories, the point of the practice is to take steps to realizing a single future. The final step then, is to schedule your future memory and begin to plan to make it happen.

"Future" ​by Hollie Chastain

Naming Our Future Memories

September 12, 2020: visit my son in his new home in Grand Junction, CO. I'll book my flight well in advance.
​- Dorothy McKenna