FUTURE MATTERS

By Claire A. Nelson

GYMNASTS 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.

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

claustrophobia of being locked-in to yet another Zoom meeting, locked away from the futures we want to return to, and struggling to keep the ‘futwisties’ on lockoff. ‘Futwisties’ - that feeling of temporary loss of spatial- temporal awareness when the mental and emotional training that has enabled you to excel in the parkour of futures studies is frayed by a sudden jump in the need for ever-increasing speed, agility and adaptability.

Just in time, a ray of hope! Thanks to the bold and the beautiful who have now made it okay, if not normal, to prioritize our mental health. Yes! Shout outs to Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex, to the Queen of the Courts, Naomi Oasaka, and Gymnastics Royalty Her GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) Simone Biles, for helping to make talking openly about our mental health become more normalized or, if not yet normalized, becoming less stigmatized. The growing number of mental health, self-care, and emotional wellness apps coming on-line are certain signals for the normalization of AI-enabled mental health care in our future. One wonders what this says about a society that will relegate the care of our most precious selves, our mind and spirit, our soul, to the care of a machine. But it may be that AI and the APPs are better than nothing, for we know for a fact conflicts and violence are on the rise. Studies show that rising heat brings increased violence, perhaps fueled by testosterone-driven meltdowns. Why else would COVID come attendant with an increase in domestic violence at home and abroad? Our gladiators and glorious ones, by exposing their vulnerabilities -their ‘twisties’- have revealed that they are mere mortals, like us. They have shown us that survival is the first step on the road to resilience.

In the parkour of futures inquiry, we have to leap over mountains of problems, flip around walls of information, vault over chasms of missing data, doing forward rolls in order to land safely only to immediately run into some other wildcard obstacle that emerges without warning. A successful run requires that our brain take in and process data from a wide range of sources and even if we have an APP to help scale up our scanning range, the fact is the APP is only as good as the data we program it to source, survey and process. Like traceurs who choose their parkour routes to meet obstacles, we futurists must learn to see the elements in the emerging landscape not as obstacles to be avoided. Rather we must embrace them, climb, jump, let our imaginations flow to get over or around them. How on earth will we manage to stay in the flow of the seeming noise and chaos emerging all around and traverse the course like champions?

We might take refuge in the knowledge that we have been here before, ‘kindasortof’, almost 100 years ago in fact, with the Spanish pandemic flu. We might get inspired by the marvel of how they managed back then without smartphones, smart computers, robots and genome-crunching machines that have allowed us to among other things, speed up the process of vaccination science to new time records. Looking back from then to now, we know that we are on a road never before travelled. The future is not what it used to be. Today, we live in a constantly mobile 24-hour planetary civilization, on which the sun never sets. No wonder the virus is having the time of its life, traveling first class across the Pacific, hitchhiking across continents to explore new lands while spinning out new variants along the way.

As the themes of exo-consciousness and transhumanism gain interest, what will it mean for us humans to talk about mental health and well-being. How will we care for our spiritual selves in the world we are co-creating? The care of our ‘souls’ have long been the purview of the ‘Father Francis’ ,‘Psychologist Pete’ and ‘Mother Marian’ or our worlds. Will we build APPs

This global inflection point puts us squarely in the midst of truly open future. We can make headway on radical change if we

choose to move from breakdown ”to breakthrough.

that do what they do? Many innovators are betting on that. Build them and they will come. Many of the working poor, have no access to health insurance, have not health equity, and have limited access to medical treatments. But yes, there may be soon an APP for that. The rise of telehealth is eminent. The future could bring an app that allows un-insured Americans to outsource their primary and preventative care to world class service providers in developing countries, whose prices they can afford. Doctors could see patients from their homes in Africa and Asia, thus creating a win in lowering the brain drain from the developing South to the global North, and a win for those who need affordable care. Win-Win all around.

Contemplating the wildcard possibility of a viral overload where Delta begets Gamma begets Lamda and so on, down to Omega, is enough to give me a bad case of the ‘futwisties’. How will we futurists be able to traverse the shoals of the landscape that is emerging? Change is unavoidable and unrelenting. And we know from our long haul in this state of siege, that mental resilience matters much. We will need to find our way back from any ‘futwisties’ that sidelined us for a sprint or two, because we are in it for the long haul. This global inflection point puts us squarely in the midst of truly open future. We can make headway on radical change if we choose to move from breakdown to breakthrough. This moment can be a turning point in our shared story, and we can make the shift to planetary consciousness and global citizen if we choose. Some spatial distancing, remote work, telework, online workshops, conferences and summits will be part of the new norm. Perhaps we will see the establishment of Ministries for the Future emerging from the swamp of political indecision in more countries. For me, that would certainly be a reason to cheer. Meanwhile, let us take stock and prepare to birth SMART Futures for #theHUMANrace.