FUTURE MATTERS By Claire A. Nelson
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YMNASTS have to tumble, jump, swing, split, handspring, somersault, cartwheel, handstand, flip over vaults, balance on beams the width of your hands and flyway from uneven bars and land with both feet solidly planted on the ground, all while not breaking a sweat. Unless they get a bad case of the ‘twisties’ – a mental block causes gymnasts to lose their spatial awareness while in the air, which could lead to serious injuries – which they find terrifying. This is a condition that most of us mere mortals will not understand - after all, we are not gymnasts- except perhaps for some of us futurists who lose our spatial-temporal awareness (STA) while contemplating the future.
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HUMAN FUTURES
Spatial-temporal reasoning is the ability to mentally move objects in space and time to solve multi-step problems. Moreover, because futurists have more in common with the sport of parkour than gymnastics – parkour is that sport of traversing rapidly through typically a complex urban environment, negotiating obstacles by running, jumping, vaulting, climbing, rolling, and other movements in order to travel from one point to another in the quickest and most efficient way possible without the use of equipment – losing our spatial-temporal reasoning when traversing the landscape of the future could result in us getting lost in the space-time continuum, or result in massive collateral damage to those who we guide or advise.
Here we are - Summer 2021- with the 2020 Olympics now firmly in the rearview mirror. It feels like a lifetime since we have experienced life as normal – meaning summer with vacations at the beach, baseball, barbeques and jerk festivals replete with mouthwatering foods to die for, accompanied by the heart-beat pulsating sounds of roots rock reggae – with all the things we used to do in our formerly ordinary everyday lives. Instead, we live with a heightened sense of danger that is constantly changing. Now the vaccine works. Now we are not so sure. To mask or not to mask. Our adrenaline is running on overtime as we imagine danger we cannot see everywhere. We are in a case of perpetual high-alert, on lockdown, feeling our way through the
