In The Present

Thoughts On Uncertainty, The Future, And The Purpose Of Hope

When I was in elementary school, fall mornings felt just as they have recently. Out in the front of the school there would be a pile of leaves I thought was monstrous at the time. Compared to anyone’s front yard in the Midwest or East Coast, I’m sure it was laughable. Some friends and I would throw ourselves, rocks, sticks, or anything else we could find, into the pile, watching it fold from the impact and quickly reform. It usually only lasted a week, our time with the leaves, before the garbage trucks came and took them away. But, even though it was only a short moment, I looked forward to it with a slight amount of anticipation, just as I did the crunch of leaves as I walked to school. This was before I moved to the east coast, before Oregon, before much of what shaped my life really came along. I was a kid, life uncomplicated by the world and its constant rushing forward. I had the leaves. I knew they would go, but at least I had a moment to enjoy them.

And though I feel much of that way still—a joy for the everyday moments I get to live in full understanding of how brief they may be—the fear of the coming Trump presidency, what that means for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza along with the outright lunacy of this world in all its deranged and confused capitalist facets, mingling with an inevitable and uncertain understanding that things must change, I am becoming overwhelmed by how quickly the future is rushing forward. As I look at democracy, I wonder if even moderate progressive politics will ever take hold in my home state (we literally couldn’t even say no to slavery for inmates this year) let alone the country. Despite climate change and the myriad of quiet emergencies it houses that the world seems to avoid looking at and accepting—change is inevitable. It just depends on which way we go. 

There is a paradox in time, or at least in how I think of it: it is at once inevitable and therefore asks us to remain humble in its power over us, yet there is also the potential in the present to take actions that may alter the future that does exist in the present. How do we hold these two things together? 

Despite this anxious obsessing over the future, the fall is here, only to quickly leave us with bare trees and a memory of childhood. The consistent crisp of these last few days, the squeezing of daylight by the movement of the Earth around the sun. It returns and, even in an ever unknown future, will shift again into another season, another kind of season, and eventually return to another cool fall day.

This is a time of limbo. I’m sure so many people are uncertain of their future right now. In that anxiety over the future we may start to believe the world is doomed, that it is broken, unfixable. Maybe it is. Maybe it will inevitably end in a dumpster fire of shit posts, AI internet slop, fascistic capitalist bed buddies burning our bodies from the heat death of the Earth. We seem to fear that the future is determined in such a way. A rhetoric of fear permeates European, British, and American politics (I’m sure elsewhere as well, but these are the politics I know best). But, simply put, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Seasons, but more so geology, will shift, will alter and repeat. The Earth's ancient patterns will continue with or without us.

In Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, she quotes from John McPhee’s Control of Nature about our inability to see the past and its portent for the future. Referring to a history of consistent mud slides and debris flows on the mountains of the San Gabriels tucked beside Los Angeles, Odell quotes McPhee: “A super-event in 1934? In 1938? In 1969? In 1978? Who is going to remember that?...Mountain time and city time appear to be a bifocal event with geology functioning at such remarkably short intervals, people have ample time to forget.” 

Odell suggests that this short term collective memory is a case of forgetting greater realities beyond ourselves by fixating on solitary events or issues. As Odell says, “The ‘issue’ is a failure to recognize the mountain itself. While the people McPhee interviews may appreciate what this rise in the landscape affords them—a vertical escape from the city, proximity to ‘nature,’ a masterful view of the valley, or even some neat rocks—the San Gabriels seem to appear to them only as a backdrop or a nuisance…The mountain is inert [in their view of it] and thus controllable.”

We are forgetting that we are humans, and we will fail and prevail in similar ways as we have in the past. We fall to strongmen and fight back. Our homes are destroyed by sliding boulders and we will hubristically build on the moving mountain, forgetting its shifts. We will look at a moment of traditional weather patterns and slide into its familiarity and comfort, not because we’ve known it for so long, but because we’ve been told it is normal. This is only human. We should take in the peace, the content, where we can. But for everything else we shouldn't lose sight of the forest, because without its perspective we’ll fall into a false sense of determinism, of a fixed future when it is not so at all. 

Rebecca Solnit thinks of hope as not some sunny feeling that placates our action for naive well wishers, but rather is the sense of an understanding that the future has not yet come to pass, and because of that, we can act in ways that alter that future for the better, even in the face of cultural narratives telling us that it is not possible. After Trump won the election, Solnit tweeted, “They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”

And this is necessary to understand: without imagination, futures will not be created and pushed forward in the present. 

I do believe that things can shift for better. But I’m not foolish. I feel like shit. I’m lost. I’m in limbo, politically, personally, and with my work. I am depleted and tired and full of pain and anger and sadness. I just want things to be easy right now. Nothing in my life, as I’m sure is true for most of us, feels certain at all. I feel horrified about the world and what want to say fuck it to everything. I want to pretend I’m a seven year old kid again, playing in cold air with crunching sycamore leaves at my feet, and friendships that are simple. But I can’t. I live in this world. So, I need hope and the reminder that the earth shifts, that the most important moment is the one where I sit right now as I write this, that I need to help hope move change forward, with whatever means I have to give.

My sister keeps reminding me that yes this is all terrible. But we're a bunch of monkeys on a rock floating in space and that rock has oceans where whales live. Our world is small compared to the cosmos, yes, but I take this also to mean, in its smallness, there is room for things to change.

I’m not sure where the next steps are, in so many ways, but they’ll start here, at least for me, with writing, with trying to talk, trying to understand myself and those I’m surrounded by. It will move from there to connecting with small groups, finding ways to support those around me, and seeking support. Because I know that only from those small actions that slowly build on top of each other, the future is made.