Our influence on future terrestrial life is our tangible and concrete after-life.
Humans are currently suffering in a shared global longstory crisis. Longstory crisis is my way of saying that our current global stories and objectives lack meaning for our collective future. Our crisis grows as our population and technical capacity grows in its influence on the future state of our planet. We recognize that the stories we are living may drastically compromise possibilities for future life. Since stories are the foundation of our relationships with each other, a new shared global longstory is needed. We need a story that resonates broadly and binds us in coherent resonance with others living in the present and attends to the needs of future life.
I suggest that we begin a concordant, deliberate and lucid process of collecting and synthesizing our new longstory with a question: “How would you choose to live, if you could live from love for yourself and future life?” I would like to use the processes I have used in my consulting work to build our new longstory by talking with many people around the world to learn their answer to this question, and to learn how they feel about the stories we are currently living. This is how my consulting work has flowed. I speak with many people, one-on-one, listening and reflecting their thoughts until they feel fully heard, then synthesize their views with the views of those from previous discussions. Even with complicated problems the shared desires quickly come to the surface and represent the desires held by the broader group. Then I share the solidifying story with larger groups and include their responses until there is a general sense of mutual story representation.
You may ask “How does this scale”. My experience with complex problems is that, once a broad representative group of people’s insights are accumulated, fewer than you may think, the shared narrative tends to only change in small increments beyond the central theme. Since it has never been attempted on a national or world scale, it would be an experiment and an act of faith to begin the process.
So are we ready to engage in our shared future longstory development? We’re never fully prepared for the true adventures of life. Our adventures choose us through the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We either rise to the occasion, or our adventure becomes a tragedy. This is one of those times. Our current circumstances bring us to our adventure.
When I share this idea with others, this idea of developing a living global shared longstory, on the scale of ten-thousand years, they express what I felt when I was first seized by the idea: a feeling of overwhelming scope, agitated excitement for its potential, and a visceral sense that it might be possible. After discussion, most people grow in their sense that fundamental, enduring, and connecting human story objectives may be discoverable and identifiable. When I first described this idea to my close friend Dacotah, she quickly recalled the lyrics of the song Russians by the artist Sting: “I hope the Russians love their children too”. Ignoring the specific reference to “Russians”, this perspective struck her as an example of a heartfelt and rational human empathic desire for the well being of future generations, an example of a potentially shared, fundamental, and guiding principle for building a shared longstory, a story with which we can all resonate.
Would you be willing to participate in such a project in a one-on-one discussion about how you would prefer that we live, about what you believe we would do if we were living from love for self and future life?
Any other feedback or discussion points are also welcome.