Digital Art: I.Rimanoczy
A few months ago, Katrin Muff, dean of the Business School Lausanne, Switzerland, guided a room filled with hundreds of deans and academics through an unusual exercise: Imagine the world you would like to live in. What does it look like? How does it feel? Where are you living, what work are you doing, how are you moving around, who forms part of your closer circle, larger circle? What do your friends do? Imagine all the details you can possibly imagine.
That exercise suddenly brought a reality to me: I have been working for a decade on sustainability, writing, researching, interviewing, speaking, teaching, blogging, reflecting, dialoguing, fostering, coaching, even praying. The core of all those activities has been to learn and share more about what is happening, to understand cause-effect relations and feedback loops; studying graphs and statistics, news and legislation, initiatives and lawsuits, innovations and breakthroughs, benchmarks and media coverage, and people's opinions. I have connected the dots between our values, behaviors and consequences. I have extensively advocated for the need for change accelerators. But in that fraction of a moment a question dawned on me: accelerate change towards... what?
I realized that I could paint an extensive picture about the damage to our soils, health, communities, air, or any earthly resource. But I had such a hard time framing in my mind this simple picture that Katrin was inviting the academics to sketch: What would you like the world to look like?
The thought spiraled for months in my mind. How can we ever arrive at a desired point, when we don't even know where it is? How can we plan, prepare, and reach it if it's not even in our imagination?
In a conversation I recently had with Dean Preston Jones from H.Wayne Huizenga College of Business and Entrepreneurship, he pointed out that when Dr. King spoke about his dream, he didn't deny the terrible things that were happening at that time, but he focused on a dream. He painted an image of what was possible, and that became the starting point of what became many plans, and a reality. But today, Jones reflected, it seems that all the focus is on what is wrong, and on fear, fear and more fear. Where can that take us?
I reflected on the very human feeling of fear. It is in our nature to acknowledge our fragility and to be scared of what could happen. There is no scarcity of reasons that elicit feelings of fear -- since fear is in the mind, and the mind has an endless capacity to imagine. When we fear a bear standing in our jogging path in the forest, we have a physical reaction that is connected to images in our mind: bears attacking people, in movies, perhaps in a previous experience, or in stories we read. We combine these images in a fraction of a second and react physically and emotionally to the worst scenario bundled in one single feeling: fear. The fear has the absolute intensity of reality of an event that is not happening, but could take place. Now bears are bears, and if fear helps us to react in a way that is cautious, preventative, or that applies something we learned we should --or should not do, it may be very useful to get us through the moment.
But let's face it: In our everyday existence we have many more fearful moments than encounters with bears. Even if we could personally not provide sufficient moments of fear in our life, there is plenty of "help" from the outside that can "educate" us in what we should be afraid of: economy, markets, government, terrorists, depreciation, sea level rise, presidents, candidates, blacks, Muslims, Syrians, Russians, people of other ethnicity or religion, the poor, the crazy, the powerful and -- even -- the unknown. Interestingly, the invitation to fear is always filling the present with images of a possible future. The number of metaphoric "bear attacks" is minimal compared with the countless scenarios painting dramatic situations that actually exist only in our minds, and in our words.
"Watch your thoughts," the saying goes, "because they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny."
This reminds me of the story of the traveler walking on a country side road who encountered an old man. Old Man, he said, I am going to that village on the foot of the hill. How are the people there?
The old man replied: How are the people in the village where you come from?
The traveler answered: They were bad people... That is why I left.
The foot hill village has bad people, too, the old man said.
A few hours later, another traveler walked down the road, and addressed the old man. Old Man, he said, I am going to that village on the foot of the hill. How are the people there?
The old man replied: How are the people in the village where you come from?
The traveler answered: They were great people... I loved them, and I was sorry to leave.
The foot hill village has wonderful people, too, the old man said.
We may be collectively shaping a destiny based on our fears, on thoughts of what could happen, and the feelings associated with those thoughts. By replaying them over and over, and sharing them with others, we make them seem more real. Yet, phrase it as we might, it is still something just in our mind. In our fear, we want to protect ourselves, or even attack the feared attackers. We become travelers entering a town full of bad people.
So here is a suggestion. What if we began to imagine a world that is as we would like it, and let that thought shape our words, our actions, our habits? It wouldn't be a bad destiny to create. And yes, keep the fear: We need to fear the fear.