Uncertainty Or The Foggy Future — Part 1
The paradox of our times- they are visible as fog.
The paradox of our times — they are visible as fog.
It starts with a fresh and clear night. One of those, you can see millions of stars above you. No cloud is blocking the view. You breathe in possibilities and breathe out life.
Since no cloud is blocking your view, nothing is also blocking the radiation of the heat, stored during the day in the ground around you. It is getting colder.
Not only does the ground cool down, but so does the air around it.
In our earth’s atmosphere, there is always a certain amount of water present. After all, 70% of our firm planet’s surface is water.
Now we need a lucky coincidence of two factors. If there is enough water present in the air around you, and if the cooling process hits a certain temperature — then physics turns into magic.
The fog sets in.
And fog can be absolutely beautiful. It is one of those natural phenomena that makes you stand and watch in shock and awe, touched by the endless beauty of the world around us. This feeling of just being. And that being is enough.
But it can also be terrifying. There is a reason in horror movies things always seem to happen in a foggy backstreet.
Or when you drive and lose the sight. Especially driving a road you have never been to before.
Uncertainty works just the same way.
Humanity had a bright sunshiny day. It was beautiful. Everything was moving forward. Progress was made. Our environment (abstractly spoken) heated up.
We overlook that what we call progress is not a linear movement leading to one goal. Just like the earth does a complex combination of rotating around its inclined axis, while speeding through space around the biggest attractor around, the sun, our path as its inhabitants is not linear.
(See it from a very simplified standpoint: nothing, literally nothing, around us moves linear or is flat or two-dimensional — why should we be exempt?)
The moment we accept this, one thing is inevitable — the day has to end at some point, as the sun sets.
In terms of humanity, it became clear that the concept of progress of being more is about to reach its natural end. A society of abundance cannot be built on limited resources, nor on the backs of members of the same society that were forcefully kept down.
On the day that never seemed to end, the evening twilight began.
The temperature is right to liquefy dissolved water. And indeed it did. What before was invisible, yet there for a long time, showed itself by reflecting the light.
Isolation from nature, ourselves, and a collective, alienation from shared values, vast economic disparities, the erosion of our basic trust in ourselves, humanity, as a whole, and consequently cultural fragmentation.
As stated — these things are not new, or recent. They evaporated from the sea of times over a long period.
Our narrative emphasis was on “becoming” in opposition to “being”. And don’t get me wrong here, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
(I even dare to say that the notion of becoming is something inherent to being human. After all, I am in the field of futures; if there wasn’t something inside of us, looking, dreaming, daring, and dreading beyond — what point would futures have? Or is it so, that our narrative of “becoming” is forcing us to think ahead — and if we just let go?)
Yet as with almost anything in life, it comes with pitfalls.
When the focus is on the movement, everything that ties us — is considered a hindrance.
We kept moving, cutting down all our bonds to move quicker, to get there faster.
What we forgot on the way — bonds and ties form nets. And nets are strong supporters of weight. Nets help us to share the weight of the responsibility that comes with life itself.
Additionally, we ran off in all possible directions. Where our bonds and nets guided us, the ones tied together, in the same direction, now we were running into the vast landscape of our individual tomorrows.
As it goes, if you are running with weight — it works for a while, but eventually, it slows you down and tires you out.
Exhausted of becoming, moving through fog, we ironically produced ourselves, we did not even realize that we left solid ground.
While the complexities and uncertainties were always all around us — the unique circumstances we find ourselves in, now at the entrance of the archipelago of emergence, just made them visible.
The paradox of our times — they are visible as fog.
And as in all those scary horror movies — we are afraid of what might wait out there in the fog for us.
So we are looking for all kinds of solutions to look through that fog around us. To see what is coming. To plan. To prepare.
But maybe we should consider the wise words of Jonathan Lockwood Huie when doing that:
Sometimes we need the fog to remind ourselves that all of life is not black and white. — Jonathan Lockwood Huie
This is the first article on contemplations about uncertainty and our human responses to it.
