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Better Than You Can Imagine
“Feel the way you are going to feel when it turns out better than you can imagine.”
I have been honouring that injunction for 52 years. I am convinced that in the face of a medical death sentence it allowed me to live. And to co-found a school. And to meet Christopher. And to uncover the “Thinking Environment.” And to get to write and to publish.
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Feel it. Now. An unimaginably good future. As if it were already here. Feel the way you will feel when it is. It’s the feeling that changes the game.
In 1972 I knew about visualising a particular desired outcome. And I am sure that is a good thing to do. But the difference between visualising an outcome you can imagine and feeling an outcome you can’t is monumental. Same planet. Wildly different creatures.
Letting Go
The idea is that focusing on an outcome we cannot imagine keeps us from limiting the outcome to one that we can imagine. “Better than you can imagine,” is an act of letting go.
Taking Charge
And feeling the way we will feel when that unimaginably good outcome occurs is an act of taking charge, of entirely de-victimising ourselves. We can visualise something as a victim, but we can’t feel it as a victim. Feeling an even-better-than-you-can-imagine outcome is an entirely victim-free, in-charge state of mind.
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Huge Challenge
But letting go while taking charge can be challenging. Choosing to let go of the contents of the future can run up against many people’s habit of preferring to control.
And contradictorily, the very act of feeling the way you will feel when it turns out better than you can imagine can run up against many people’s habit of being a victim.
So when we first attempt to feel the way we will feel when an outcome turns out better than we can imagine without dictating what that outcome will look like, we can at first slip into only picturing ourselves happy, not feeling the happiness. Feeling the happiness seems to call on a set of different skills from just picturing it. We can talk about how we would feel. But actually to feel it, now, in our bodies? That’s hard. But doable. And, apparently, crucial.
I sometimes wonder whether there is something in that contradictory demand of simultaneously taking charge and letting go that produces the power the present has to create the future. I wonder whether that contradiction in some mysterious way creates resolution. Maybe?
The Theory
Anyway, the actual theory1 is that the feeling that the unimaginably good future has already happened, the feeling that the future is the present, the feeling of it, is what creates it in some sort of woo woo quantum way. I’m not a woo woo person generally. But let’s face it, life at the most fundamental level seems pretty woo woo. Quarks? Quantum correlations? Wormholes? Spacetime? Come on. No one has actually seen or experienced or fully understands these quantum creatures. Quantum scientists are, of course, not woo wooists in the “I believe this is the work of God” sense. It is mathematics that saves the quantum woo woo from being actual woo woo. But it’s a fine line.
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So science lover that I am, I am, nevertheless, prepared to keep relying on the practice of feeling a future outcome that is better than I can imagine as a way of creating that future. I can’t prove that the feeling is the force that produces it; but I can note that feeling it seems to have worked pretty well so far. (And it has kept me de-victimised, which is said to produce immunity and good health, which is not nothing.) And, yes, maybe those amazing outcomes are just “post hoc” rather than “proctor hoc.” But? If the future keeps being better than I can possibly imagine, I’m in.
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Today
Here’s my point on this particular day. We cannot know what future our political leaders will produce. And most of us have zero influence on those leaders until the next election day or the eventual overthrow of fascism. Zero.
So we have two choices as I see it. We can either feel fearful, angry, depressed, and despairing as we imagine terrifying outcomes. Or we can feel the way we are going to feel when the outcomes are better than we could imagine. And to stay on track, we can intermittently ask ourselves, “If I knew that this could all turn out better than I can possibly imagine, how would I feel in this moment?”
That is what I’m doing.
You?
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1 See Resurrection, Neville Goddard, DeVorss, 1966 - 2008 and Excuse Me Your Life Is Waiting, Lynn GladHorn, Hodder, 2005.
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Context (Again)
I return today to context as a ‘holy’ thing. I risked that label four years ago (https://www.nancykline.com/more-i). It was bold. Even brazen. I thought I might eventually renounce it and apologise for hyperbole.
But no. If anything I now wish there were a more glorifying term for it, for its importance, for its answer to ‘why?’, even about humanity’s most monstrous moves. My increased worship of context as a concept is Barry Oshry’s fault. I have been reading his wonderful book, Notes on Complexity (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996). He said this on page 13:
“We think we are dealing person-to-person when, in fact, we are dealing context-to-context.”
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Oshry’s point is massive. He is describing the universe, inclusive of us, as one giant context. My point is minuscule. I am describing myself and my friends, or at most my country and another country.
For one thing, we cannot understand what even one person does unless we understand the full context in which they do it. The full context. Which means every minute of their life since conception and everything that’s gone on in their world and in the world since their conception. And in the universe. for that matter.
So good luck with that, I say to myself. We can never understand anyone, even ourselves. What fun is that? And what’s the point of all this brain that loves to figure stuff out, to charge into the confusion and sort it out once and for all? It makes every bit of that seem farcical. (Except for therapy, I guess, which at least seeks to understand an individual’s actions and feelings by discerning their context. A bit. A micro bit. But something.)
So we can’t be purists about this. We can’t be greedy. We have to settle for crumbs. Therefore, I am, as of this moment, committing to seeing context through the same 3-D glasses through which I see the person in front of me in this moment. I promise to listen to their thoughts and feelings and points of view and regrets and dreams and outrages and raptures, wondering what they will say next, agreeing with them, arguing with them, praising them, informing them, guiding them, learning from them, rejoicing in them, despairing of them, laughing with them, and in the very same instant to ask myself, “What is their context for all of this? And what is mine? And how do those two, just those two entirely unimportant and barely perceivable contexts, intersect?”
I promise.
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And I promise to remember this from Bill Godwin:
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“There is, at least in American political discourse, an unspoken assumption that polarization is somehow a dysfunction (and another usually unspoken assumption that if the other side would just “see the light” and agree with our side, polarization would disappear). I would argue that polarization is much more fundamental than that; that it expresses a real difference in the life experiences of the two sides.”
Context.
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The “life experience of the two sides.” What would change for us if we could remember that? If we could remember to notice that there is context going on here. Always. “Two different life experiences,” two different repositories of information, two different maps of overlapping assumptions about almost everything. Two different cradles of sacred beliefs.
If we could just remember that context is everything even if we can never know it fully, or even at all, what might happen for us as we hear, as we see, as we listen? As we talk? As we absorb their response? Or even as we just enter the room and notice them there?
We are required, I think, to be aware of a reality even when we can know almost nothing about it. If it is there, it requires our acknowledgement. And an indefatigable attempt to factor it in, to see in terms of it.
Context. The reality that is always there.
Always.
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Greg
Distinctions are everything.
For a hundred years (roughly) I’ve been trying to “let go.” If you knew me, you might say that I’ve been only meaning to "let go.” Not even trying. But if you were me, you’d know how hard I have tried. You really would. And you’d feel for me because effort alone deserves at least a C+ in life. Well, C–.
And often in life when for years we’ve been trying hard to do something but really can’t, it is not a cop-out to rethink the concept. Honest. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not us. Maybe it is the idea itself. I know this sounds blame-ducking. But it’s worth a try. We can always resume self-castigation if we’re wrong. We’re good at that.
Anyway, last year I discovered that this time for real and forever I absolutely had to “let go.” I won’t go into details, but trust me, it was urgent. So I remembered the first time I ran into this “let go” concept. It was in my first year of teaching at a new and kind of experimental Quaker school. It came from one of my students who sprinkled wisdom wherever she went, floating around campus as she did in her 1960’s paisley caftan and knotted golden locks. “Let go; let God,” she whispered.
I wasn’t a big fan of that idea then (the gossamer caftan didn’t help), and 55 years later I still couldn’t do it. For one thing, if there is a God whom everyone is letting run their lives, he/she/it is clearly overworked and could easily get things wrong. For another, I am too controlling (obviously) to hand over something to an “other” as elusive and, as I said, busy as that.
So I knew that would not work in this full-fledged crisis I was having. Then I invoked a piece of wisdom from Christopher’s mother, “Offer it up,” she used to say. I love that. And that kind of worked. It got me all the way to a deep down intellectual commitment to letting go of this thing. And I found that if I kept renewing my intention to “offer it up,” I seemed able to remain dispassionate enough not to kill the person in question, which was my noble aim. (Of course, if you have to keep offering it up, you probably aren’t offering it up. If you know what I mean.)
Then Greg spoke. I found this out from my sister who gets to be with Greg as a life-changing resource once a week. I’m not jealous, just happy for her. I’d like to be happy for me, too, but Greg is hers and I’m letting go of all of that. I really am. But that’s not the crisis.
“Greg and I were talking about this challenge of letting go," she said. “He prefers: ‘Let go; let flow.’” And that did it. I was a new person the very next minute. And I absolutely knew that it would be permanent. You know how something clicks in and that’s just that? That was me. Then, tomorrow, always. “Let go; let flow.” Perfect.
Here’s maybe why: “Let go; let God” hands the journey to an “other” and leaves you behind. “Let go; let flow” recognises it’s out of your hands. but takes you with it.
Distinctions matter.
PS
And actually, if we have to hand it over to an “other,” maybe we should say, “Let go; let Greg.”
"Too Long Didn’t Read”
You have a message. You look at it. The message is long. You are a breathlessly busy person, so you don’t take three minutes to read it. Fair enough. But you also do not take three seconds to send a holding reply like, “Thank You Will Reply Soon.”
You just write: “TLDR.” Too Long Didn’t Read.
Seriously?
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Do you do this? Or do you know anyone who does?
I just came across this thing, this profane four-letter word less-ness. Is there a horizon of communication cruelty out there that I have not been seeing? There must be. I am not on a single social media platform (expressly because of their built-in pulverising of civility, of hearts, of thinking, of real connection). So I have 100% not been alert to the increments of viciousness, to the stealthy proliferation of pain-installing dialogue that group facelessness can produce.
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I think my TLDR outrage in this moment is a bit like my arriving in Los Angeles in 1968, having lived all of my 18 years in the blue-sky purity of New Mexico, and feeling an anvil on my chest, only to be told it was smoke and fog, recently termed “smog,” that had, over many years, saturated the air because of our cars, and was now in my lungs.
You’re kidding.
TLDR is that shocking to me. Literally – I could barely breathe yesterday when I saw it for the first time.
And I remember wondering in that Los Angeles moment how Karl Benz in 1885 had not been smart enough to ask himself the “Then What?” question. How did he not factor in toxic emissions before the first car left the drawing board? Or how could Henry Ford have in 1908 not asked his considerable self questions about poisonous fumes before he dumped on the nation millions of Model Ts from his ingenious assembly lines?
I remember wondering why when, 35 years later, the sun began to disappear in California and the coughing began, the manufacturers of cars did not say “sorry,” and address smog immediately. How, in fact, they denied it. How it took another 30 years before even the catalytic converter was invented, and 26 years beyond that before enough law suits and regulations finally curbed emissions density and toxicity, and the California skies reappeared. How? How could it have taken so long?
I am sitting here today “coughing.” How, I wonder, did our messaging each other become so toxic? How did Neil Papworth not see this coming with the first text 33 years ago? How long will it take to stop it now? Can, in fact, anything be done? Where is our verbal catalytic converter? Where are our regulations?
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Unfortunately there are no catalytic converters for this “machine,” except us. There are no regulators except us. We are the sources of action here. We need a human outbreak of civility. An agent that enters the heart and makes it care how people feel when they receive messages, what happens to their self esteem and joy and ability to think for themselves and to walk tall after they read them.
We need to produce a transformation of consciousness that somehow convinces everyone to be kind. All of the time. Even when we encounter evil as we see it. Even when we are riding through the night to rescue the children we were from the dangers that lure. Kindness must become our regulation.
Please tell everyone you know that they are better than TLDR; that they do have three seconds to send a holding reply; that time is all they have, in fact. The rest is all made up. And what we make up – how we behave with each other – needs to nurture so that the time we have can nurture us.
But if you are desperately, excruciatingly, look-at-me busy and have lost the capacity to write sentences, at least try this:
TYWRS
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“I’ll just do this one thing first. It will take only a minute. It really will.”
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So goes my daily dip into denial. And with it the vanishing of my intentions. Sara Hart 1 brilliantly calls this disappearance “but-firsts.”
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Inevitably the first “but-first” leads to another and to another. “But-firsts” are like zygotes in that way. They contain their own proliferators. The first one instantly produces a vast population of others. They are like popcorn or chocolate – redoubtably irresistible.
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So I have started to be wary of these charmers that sneak in as I set intentions. I am trying to get very good at recognising the beguilement of “but-firsts.” This entails revving up my “but-first” sensors the minute an intention forms. At that very second I look under the throws, on top of the planters, inside the game cupboard to catch and flick away the sign saying: Welcome To Zygote Land.
So far I am just a C- student at this expertise. But having started as a failure, I’m hopeful. I am getting better at spotting the pita bread halves of the zygote and banishing them. To label the zygote a “but-first” is a great start because once we name something, we can no longer deny it.
This piece is due to be published in January. January is officially the month for intentions, for goals. To my relief, years ago I gave up setting New Year’s goals. The private humiliation of defeat by February became too much. But there was a time when Christopher and I held a two-day workshop called, “Dreams and Goals.” The final segment, on New Year’s Day, asked each person to come to the front of the room and declare their dreams and goals for the year. Blessedly, there was no followup workshop called, “Did You Do Them?”
But if you set goals for 2026, I hope you also fine-tuned your “but-first” detector and have its zygote self squarely in your cross hairs. Humiliation, however private, is no way to live a year.
I’m sure Sara would agree.
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1 Sara Hart: https://hartcom.com/sara-speaking/
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