In Medias Res Where Freedom Exists in Our Climate Action Story
Our Story Together Series Post #1.0. Finding Hope, Inspiration, and Encouragement in Our Past and Present to Build Our Brighter Future
The present is where we can choose to change the future.
We start our story in medias res, “in the midst of things.” We start in the middle, because we are in the middle.
Much of our narrative takes place in our current moment, the present, where kairos and chronos are banging into each other to shape our future.
This current moment is no mere holding pattern, no Intermission, before we proceed with the Final Act. It is where all the action is — and I mean that literally. It is where we seize as many kairotic opportunities as we can. We cannot change the past. We cannot exist and act in the future (at least not yet, anyway, and if we did, we would be in that present).
In one sense the present barely exists. It is that nanosecond between the past and the future. From this perspective, the past and the future are massive, barely separated by that nanosecond of the present.
And yet it is these nanoseconds where we are alive, where human freedom exists and our future becomes real.
The past looms over the newborn present like a giant, in many instances sucking freedom right out of the current moment.
The future is as vast as the ocean and the horizon and the sky, stretching into the immensity of space.
The present is like footprints on a beach immediately washed away by the tide of the future becoming the present.
But we also think of the present as more than the nanosecond between the past and the future. We think of it as the time in which we live. We think of it as “our time.” We make comparisons with the past and say such things as “In the past they did it this way, but in our time we do it differently.” The present encompasses how human beings live now, and that sense of now extends into the immediate past and immediate future.
In the present we are in the now. We are in now-time. We are in our time.
The past is in its own prison that it created where nothing can be changed. Yet the past does not die or rather is reborn and comes alive again in the present. The past wants to live!
As William Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
It has a massive, iron grip on the present, and through the present the future. For those who dwell in the past — we also say they “live in the past” (which is, of course, not literally possible) — they want the present to be on autopilot and for the future to be the reincarnation of their romanticized past. The truth is, they don’t like freedom because they don’t like change.
In contrast, we are all about exercising our freedom to create change because we must — massive change the likes of which the world has never seen. So those aspects of the past that want to keep things as they were, that are stuck in stasis, they are impediments. And those who want to dwell in our fossil burning past, they, too, are impediments. They are past-dwellers consuming the past in the present and torching the future.
Yet the past is not all about stasis and fossils. For example, the accelerating rate of technological change or ARTC, one of our four Catalytic Sources of Transformation, the Catalytic-4, comes out of the past and present to help create the future.
The past provides the building blocks for us in the present to choose to create the future we desire.
And so what will it be, what will we choose to take from the past — stumbling blocks or building blocks?
Stumbling blocks or building blocks from our past?
In the present, the only place where human freedom can exist, we must choose building blocks, not stumbling blocks, from our past.
In the present we are in kairos-climate-time; we are in our time where the time to fulfill our destiny is now. We must be fully present for the sake of the future. We must continually face forward, not backward. We must be forward-leaning.
We cannot be Past-dwellers. We must be Future-makers.
We are not past-dwellers, we are future-makers, taking what we need from the past to create in the present our vision of the future where climate change is overcome as we create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
The present is where we choose to create our future. It is where we stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better, where all our values come to life. It is where we become the hope we’ve been waiting for. It is where we act with purpose because this is our time.
And yet even as we are in the midst of the action on all of our Olympian Fields of Action we need to situate ourselves in time, to glimpse what has gone before us, to catch the vision of the future we are creating together as we build it in the present.
To fulfill our destiny we need to know where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. We are, in our time, in media res, where freedom exists. Join us!
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