How to Fall In Love with the Future
review and other news
Hello wonderful readers!
This is the first of our occasional, interim newsletters to let you know about thrutopian initiatives, publications and happenings, and we’re very happy indeed to be sharing our first review! Lisa Richardson, a Canadian-Australian freelance journalist and alumni of Manda Scott’s Thrutopia Masterclass, reviews Rob Hopkins’ new book How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World which is out now with Chelsea Green publishing.
Bending The Arc opens for submissions between 7th and 31st July and we need YOUR thrutopian poems, short stories, novel extracts, non-fiction and hybrid pieces. Our Submissions page has full details of what we’re looking for and how to submit.
To warm you up, Lisa’s review below is packed with points of departure for journeying to liveable, thriving futures such as:
“Be on the look-out, because the future sends clues back to you, in the here and now, ALL THE TIME. We’re surrounded by proof of the possibilities: little seeds and notes and nuggets dropped like messages in bottles, for you to pick up, collect, collage with, and do everything you can to nurture. Solar powered restaurants, car-free neighbourhoods, local food systems, de-paved neighbourhoods – real things that people have already imagined into existence.”
You might also like to seek inspiration in a brilliant new resource, the Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook - out now! - produced by the Climate Fiction Writers League who are a group of authors who believe in the necessity of climate action, immediately and absolutely.
If you’d like to review for Bending The Arc, or have a title you think would be of interest to our readers, please get in touch: bendingthearcmagazine@substack.com
We’ll be publishing Edition Two of Bending The Arc in October. Until next time, fellow thrutopians!
The editors,
Laura Baggaley, Ilse Pedler, Katherine Stansfield, Hilary Watson & Alice Willitts
Ten Ways to Fall in Love with the Future
By Lisa Richardson
Out now from Chelsea Green Publishing, Rob Hopkins’ How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World is playful and practical, rousing and urgent. Activism, he says, isn’t working, and maybe the reason we’ve failed has something to do with our relationship to the future.
Right now, our future has been “colonized by megalomaniacal billionaires, crushed by precariousness” – and that’s not cool.
I loved this book packed with interviews, examples and hints of what’s possible and have renewed admiration for those who’ve practiced this kind of thinking for a long time now (the futurist-pioneers!). How to Fall In Love with the Future is all the blueprint you need to start tinkering and time-travelling yourself. Take friends with you! The future needs all the time travelling imagineers we can get.
Taking a cue from Hopkins’ passion for immersive experiences to help activate our senses and potential, my review has morphed into a personal manifesto for becoming a time-traveller (and changing the world):
1. Travel to the future, frequently. That way, you build a map in your mind, and won’t have to resort to Google Maps. The more often you go there, the more at home you will be because the future will match your memories of a vibrant, thriving world instead of the latest dystopian version we’re currently being fed. Nurture your memories by saying, “when I was in the future I remember…”
2. Don’t worry so much about the naysayers. The ones who say “it can’t be done, it’s too expensive, we’ve already tried that, we need to wait until we know more, we should go more slowly.” When I was in the future, they were the ones saying, “well, it was inevitable, really,” which is what they say about everything, not realizing that all inevitabilities had seed points and gardeners.
3. Let the cynical sceptical grouch who patrols the borders of your imagination have a night off. Trust your longing. You might have to peel off a few layers of armour to find it again, but your longing is there, deep down, quietly singing about love.
“Longing is different than desire. Desire is an itch that wants to be scratched, but longing is the ache that accompanies a deep love that lives in your heart.”
Grant Faulkner4. Feed your longing. Take offerings to her. Feed her with poetry, images, songs, smells – things that delight you, land you in your body, make you feel alive, young again. (Birdsong and the smell of exuberant blooms and the whir of a thousand wheels at bicycle rush hour.) She is a very true guide and she will talk to you, the more you nourish her.
5. When you’re in the future, behave as if you’re on a first date that you want to go really really well. Don’t talk too much. Listen. Ask generative questions. Pay attention to what you see. Do not past-splain!
6. Realize that the future is not a far-off place, because time is fluid, and it’s all unfolding and morphing and becoming and unbecoming all the time. Let loose your mind’s grip on the future as something fixed and far-away. You can fall in love with the future right now. You don’t have to wait. If you close your eyes you can catch a whiff of it, just about to appear.
7. Be on the look-out, because the future sends clues back to you, in the here and now, ALL THE TIME. We’re surrounded by proof of the possibilities: little seeds and notes and nuggets dropped like messages in bottles, for you to pick up, collect, collage with, and do everything you can to nurture. Solar powered restaurants, car-free neighbourhoods, local food systems, de-paved neighbourhoods – real things that people have already imagined into existence.
8. Be open-hearted. Put on your rose-lensed glasses everywhere you go, and scan for clues and messages on what to do now. You’ll see them – glimpses of scrappy seedlings that will become orchards and old-growth forests.
9. Look for the other time-travellers (with their helmets tucked under their arms) watching you. You are powerful in this moment that everything depends on. Future descendants are thanking you for thinking of them, loving them, preceding them.
10. Summon the future of your longing, and do it with friends and colleagues, do it out loud, do it with music and food and an air of celebration and festival and ceremony. Bring an orchestra or a marching band or balloons. Make invitations. This has been done before. You won’t be the first. And yes, it takes a great heart-open vulnerability, but so does any love story. So does any great moment. After that initial panic flare of, “oh gosh, why did I do this, will anyone even come?”, you will be swept up in the vibrance of it, because that is what the future does. It sweeps you up. So why on earth would you settle for anything less than a future you could fall in love with, with all your heart?
Rob Hopkins sums up the thrutopian endeavour of writing FOR what you want rather than against what you don’t with this quote:
“We must be able to envision the future we actually want to the extent that we muster the will to do what needs to be done in order to make that vision a reality – to the degree that it becomes our magnificent new North Star and we can’t imagine doing anything else. In other words, maybe slamming the brakes on this juggernaut of self-destruction needs to be more about imagining the future we actually want and bringing that alive in people’s hearts, minds and bones, than it is about parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and banners reading, ‘We’re Fucked’?”
To help people cultivate a nostalgia for the future, Hopkins has been zipping back and forth in time with his friend Mr Kit, collecting sound samples for the Field Recordings from the Future project, so you can hear how beautiful things sound, just around the corner in 2030.
The point in activating your imagination is to be playful and have fun, which is why this book, while being both an urgent and relevant provocation, is also a genuine delight. Now who wants to unleash their longing and come time-travelling with me?
Lisa Richardson is an Australian-Canadian newspaper columnist, essayist and community resilience advocate, based on the west coast of Canada on the unceded territory of the Lil’wat Nation, where she’s been annually voted “Pemberton’s Favourite Writer” since 2007. Co-founder of a local bike-powered farm celebration event, the Slow Food Cycle Sunday, instigator of an Active Hope Climate Squad, and organizer of the Secret Poetry Appreciation Society’s Poetry Pop-Up live poetry reading circles, she also offers journalling workshops and yoga classes in a range of settings from backcountry horse camps, to yoga retreats, public libraries, and wellness retreats for women firefighters, as part of her mission to learn how we become future-steaders, instead of future-stealers – collectively cultivating the tools, practices and patterns to bring forth a culture, and a world, we’d be proud to leave to future generations.