How might we co-create a future that we want to live in? Here in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the darkest time of year… the time for the creative work of dreaming dreams and gestating visions, hopefully around a real fire or if not, a virtual hearth…

and our dreams, our hopeful visions of the future, are very much needed in our world today. The scary fantasies of an “inevitably AI-dominated world” where we humans have become displaced redundancies, is just a few people’s druthers. Yes, those few people happen to be ridiculously wealthy… yet THERE ARE MANY OF US who want a different world, and who are doing our best to bring that about.

I’ve recently finished writing an academic essay on this topic. The essay covers a lot of ground, but the heart of it is what I’ve just written: a different future is possible. And, it’s up to us…

Which leads to the question that many people are asking: how, how, how, do we come together? How do we learn to find one another, listen to one another, find real common ground while honoring differences? There are many of us who are working in this arena, as well…

Last summer, some friends of mine finished writing a screenplay about what the world might look like, 125 years from now, if and when we remember and relearn, how to come together in these ways… When Laurie and Terry shared their screenplay with their friends, the most frequent response was “where can I learn how to facilitate these kinds of gatherings??”

So now, we are wrapping up a 5-session, 15-hour intro course that we’ve been offering online, to a small group of inspired participants… and we are starting to plan the next one.

Yet honestly? If it was just us, I would not be feeling very hopeful. But we are just ONE SMALL DROP in a much larger wave…. yesterday I attended a meeting where a bunch of organizers, mediators, and change makers, were designing a new set of courses along broadly similar lines… with representatives from established organizations such as Braver Angels, BetterTogether America, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, the Pachamama Alliance, and more…

So, that’s my vision: “…a world where where we humans have developed widespread immunity to ‘divide and conquer’ tactics, by developing basic skills in the ‘listening arts’ of group facilitation, conflict de-escalation, conflict transformation, and community self-governance. In this imagined future, these basic human skills have become as pervasive as reading, writing, and arithmetic. This has helped us to build broad coalitions with one another, and to work constructively with the differences and misunderstandings that inevitably arise between people, before these differences flare out of control.”

I am quoting myself here, from the longer essay I linked to above. As readers of this blog know, I have been holding this vision for a long time, although it’s only recently that I’ve been able to put it into words this clearly and succinctly. Yet what is most important here, is that there are MANY of us who are holding this vision, or others like it… and who are taking the steps, to bring about the future that our hearts know is possible — because we’ve seen glimpses of it, over and over again, whenever a well-facitliated group of people is able to truly MEET in a way that helps open our minds and hearts to one another.

wishing you all, a very meaningful holiday season…
and would love to hear any of your thoughts, in the comments below.

with much appreciation,

Rosa