Imagine Without Predicting

(gentle music) Headspace Studio. Hi there, this is Radio Headspace, and I'm Dora Kamau. Thanks for stopping by. So a few years ago, I was in Kenya visiting family and hosting a meditation session for local community groups. In one of the sessions, we opened the group with a check-in, and I mean, a real one. I asked everyone, "How are you really doing?" A young person in the group raised their hand, took a breath, and said something that has stuck with me ever since. They said they had been feeling much better after they stopped making plans for the future. They just genuinely couldn't imagine one. The climate crisis had taken that from them. "What was the point of planning?" They said, "If the world might not be there to receive it?" Instead, they were just focused on living in the moment and focusing on one day at a time. I think we live in a world that is very good at now, instant everything, gratification in seconds, the long unguaranteed future. Well, that takes something different. It takes imagination. It takes a kind of faith that can hold uncertainty without collapsing under it. And here's what I keep coming back to. You don't have to be certain the future will be good to live as though it matters. One is a prediction and the other is a choice. I think about activists like Nelson Mandela who spent 27 years in prison. He had no guarantee he would walk out. He had no guaranteed apartheid would end in his lifetime. And yet, he kept showing up, kept thinking, kept writing as if it would. That's something beyond optimism, that's faithful investment. Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel laureate, started planting trees on degraded land in the 1970s, and then she was arrested for it. She planted 47 million trees over her lifetime, knowing that she'd never sit in the shade of most of them, but she planted anyway. Harriet Tubman made 13 missions to free enslaved people with no map and no promise of safety. She kept going back, acting as if freedom was possible and pulling others toward it with her. What they shared wasn't certainty. It was a willingness to invest in something beyond their own lifetimes. The things we build, the words we use, the seeds we plant or leave unplanted. Slowing down is how we begin to feel that weight and that possibility. So I want to close today's episode with a short offering and practice that can help us to feel connected to the future and connect us to that sense of hopeful imagination. When you're ready, take a moment to find a comfortable position, and eyes closed if you can, taking a deep breath and letting go. Now beginning to imagine the world 100 years from now, people, places, animals, plants, all the inhabitants, and just allowing the world to be here in your mind's eye, holding it gently and compassionately...