A ramble about hope and imagination. And my thoughts on raising children who believe the world can change.
I've got three children, ranging from primary school age to university age, and I spend an awful lot of time worrying about their futures - more time than i ever anticipated I would. I suspect most parents do, to be honest. It's practically in the job description, isn't it? All the usual shit: whether they'll be happy; if they'll ever find their people; will they be able to afford anywhere to live; will they be stuck working at Spoons for the rest of their lives or find work they enjoy and build lives that feel meaningful to them…?? And…and…and…??
Those were my worrying thoughts during “precedented times”, but since then I've found myself worrying about existential things more and more. What kind of world are they going to inherit? What will the climate and the planet look like when they're my age? Will they have access to the healthcare, education and public services that our generation have been so privileged (at least in the UK) to have? I increasingly worry about whether about the society they’re growing up in. Things can feel so divided and hopeless…
And if it’s occupying so much of my brain space, what does this shit do to a young person growing up with all of that hanging over them?
I think about how much of their lives they've already spent surrounded by what i can only describe as absilute fuckery. My older two lived through a global pandemic reading books like “While we can’t hug”, they’ve watched pointless wars started by egotistical dickhead leaders, wildfires and genocide unfold in real time, and they’ve grown up hearing increasingly alarming warnings about climate breakdown. Even before they had phones, they were exposed to an almost constant stream of information about everything that's going wrong in the world.
I wonder/worry how much of that they're carrying around with them. Do they feel angry, sad, helpless, anxious…(maybe some conversations I need to have again soon…)? Traditionally, I suppose, behaviours that we find frustrating or difficult to understand in young people are actually perfectly understandable responses to a world that can feel profoundly unsafe. (I studied the “rebellions” of teens and media representation at uni so I know this isn’t new.)
What happens to their ambitions and hopes if the future feels ominous or full of dread? I want my children to have hope. God oh so desperately. I want them to be BUZZING about growing up. I want them to imagine all the infinite phenomenal possibilities their lives might hold, for them to dream ridiculous dreams! I want my gorgeous children to believe that the world can become a better place because people like them are part of it.
I don't want to pretend everything is fine, because it quite clearly fucking isn't. Nor do I want to offer them false reassurance that everything will be fine. I just don’t know and they deserve better than me bullshitting them. They deserve honesty about the challenges we as humans are facing, but that those challenges aren't insurmountable, and that the future hasn't already been decided for them. (Insert rant about capitalism and patriarchy, and their huge amount of privilege as white boys in the UK that they can put to good use.)
The trouble is, some days I struggle to believe that myself when we have weeks like this where the UK Government has given the green light to the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea (telling the media before bringing it to Parliament ffs). Another fossil fuel project approved while we're supposed to be transitioning towards a more sustainable future. GIVE ME FUCKING STRENGTH. And when they pull shit like this, how are we supposed to convince our children that a better world is possible?! When the decisions being made about their futures seem so determined to repeat the mistakes of the past? We were discussing fossil fuels and greenhouse gases and rainforest destruction in my Y3 classroom in 1991 ffs. I am OVER the “mañana” attitude of our “leaders”.
But this is supposed to be a ramble about hope. So I wanted to share the things I keep coming back to, to remind my angry brain that there is hope. I've found myself returning to the work of Octavia Butler, Rob Hopkins, Sarah Wilson, Lola Olufemi and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Writers and thinkers who, in different ways, have helped me think about our relationship with the future. Reminding me of what's possible, if we can just imagine!!
I want my children to believe that they have a future worth looking forward to, so I need to find ways to believe in that future too, I guess. So perhaps imagination is where we begin…
We've become very good at imagining the worst
In 2000, the extraordinary science fiction writer Octavia Butler wrote an essay called A Few Rules for Predicting the Future. Keri Jarvis recently discussed this with us in her group Composting, sharing this link.
I rarely read sci-fi, but Butler's novels imagine societies devastated by inequality, environmental collapse, authoritarianism and analyse the consequences of political choices made decades before. NGL, it’s a bit Black Mirror-y in that reading them right now can feel wildly familiar to what we’re currently living through…But why I love her writing so much is that she poses questions about what might happen if we continue to ignore the problems already unfolding around us.
Anywaaaaaay, I digress…in that essay, she writes about when a student asked her what the answer was to all the suffering she described, Butler explained that there was no single solution. There were thousands of possible answers, and each of us could choose to become one of them.
I love that! I think so much of our despair comes from feeling utterly powerless in the face of enormous problems. We look at the scale of what's happening and wonder what difference our teeny tiny actions could possibly make.
Butler reminds us that the future has never been inevitable. History is full of sliding door stylee moments when people made decisions that changed the course of events, sometimes in ways nobody could have anticipated, and horribly predictable ones in others.
She also reminds us that looking ahead, recognising the dangers and trying to change direction is itself an expression of hope!! That's important, I reckon, because somewhere along the way we've been told that hope requires us to be optimistic. Or that because we’re hopeful we’re wearing rose tinted glasses.
We don't know exactly what the future holds, which is precisely why what we do NOW really matters.
What happened to our imagination?
Rob Hopkins, the environmentalist and founder of the Transition Towns movement, has spent years exploring how we might reclaim our collective imagination. In his book How to Fall in Love with the Future, he invites us to imagine a world in which we've responded meaningfully to the climate crisis. Although I had the paperback version, I had the audio book too and I listened to him posing questions that flexed my imagination - What would our towns look like? How would our communities function? What might we hear, smell or experience walking down the street? How would we spend our time if our lives weren't organised around endless consumption and economic growth? And I found these questions fascinating, partly because they're surprisingly difficult to answer, but also because my vision for the future looked a bit different to my children and husband’s when we chatted about it.
When you think of all the dystopian visions of the future we’re surrounded by - flooded cities, authoritarian governments, ecological collapse etc etc - on telly, in films, in books…imagining a genuinely better world might be a bit of a struggle. A fairer society. A healthier planet. But Rob encourages us to think about it in less broad terms. Like, what would they actually look like?
He asks us to imagine what it would feel like to live somewhere where everyone had a secure home or where public services were properly funded. What would it feel like if our communities were designed around the needs of people rather than the demands of profit? What would change if we started from the assumption that everyone deserved dignity, security and the opportunity to flourish?
Hopkins argues that imagination is something we can strengthen - like a muscle! - through practice. I guess a sort of neuroplasticity. And I’ve read so much of about his work and the testimonials people share that show undoubtedly that when people come together to imagine a different future, they can begin to make it real.
When so much of our political conversation is about what supposedly cannot be done, this imagination stuff feels super important.
In 2019 when I stood for Parliament in Torridge and West Devon, with a hopeful and imaginative manifesto (le sigh), I knocked on hundreds of doors and heard the same things over and over again: the country can't afford it. It's unrealistic. People won't accept it. That's just how the world works. They called me all sorts of names.
And even at the time all I could think was “well that’s very convenient for those who benefit from the world as it is.”
Sometimes (maybe if i was hydrated and had eaten a snack and didn’t feel like crying) I would retort with the things we take for granted today that would once have seemed impossible. The NHS, universal suffrage, paid holidays, legal protections against discrimination. I reminded these miserable people that NONE of these things was handed to us on a silver platter! The people in power didn’t magically decide to be generous or give a shit. Hardworking people imagined something different, organised around that vision and fought (quite literally sometimes!) to make these things happen.
We're encouraged to believe that the systems we live within are somehow the only option, and that the economic and political arrangements we've inherited are the only “realistic” solutions available to us…and perhaps that’s why we've become so bloody accustomed to imagining disaster rather than imagining possibility or hope?
On days where I do feel hopeless, like the cringey millenial nerd I am, I reach for the little navy blue book on my bookshelf that is Lola Olufemi’s “Experiments in Imagining Otherwise” and grasp her words for comfort and inspiration and some sort of reminder that I need to remain hopeful for the future, so here’s a few lines:
“no more performance for surveillance capital and friends—whisper only one promise, to remain steadfast in the belief that this cannot be all there is.” That’s one of my favourite lines.
Another is: “I believe that imaginative thinking is fuel. No, I am not an accelerationist! I once heard, ‘Optimism is too facile a thing,’ sitting in a Korean restaurant surrounded by friends. That’s when I decided that I refuse to leave anything to the arc of the moral universe.”
On page 28, I’ve scribbled my own words alongside the poetry lines where she encourages us to imagine, and every now and then i come back to these pages to see if my vision of the future has changed. It has not. And it makes me cry every time i re-read my own words. Yeh. Crying again. FFS.
Hope needs somewhere to put down roots
Which brings me beautifully to the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, particularly her writing about reciprocity and our relationship with the natural world. I know I might seem obsessed (I even went to a live talk she did the other day with another legend, Kate Raworth) but bear with me, because this is important!!
In both Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, Kimmerer draws on her knowledge as a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation to explore ways of living that recognise our responsibilities to one another and to the earth. She asks us to reconsider some of the assumptions that underpin our economic systems, like the idea that everything has a price, that growth must continue indefinitely, that the natural world exists primarily as a resource for human consumption…and instead reflect on what might happen if we approached the world with gratitude and reciprocity? If we begin to understand ourselves as part of an interconnected living system, with responsibilities towards the people, places and creatures around us? Can you imagine how different things could be if we did that? It makes me want to cry.
Another writer I adore, Sarah Wilson, explores related ideas in her writing about climate anxiety and our increasingly disconnected lives. She encourages us to reconnect with the natural world and reconsider what makes a life meaningful. She dedicated one of her books to young people with these words: “Do you want to sleep through a revolution, or do you want to wake up and reclaim your one wild and precious life?” And ooooofftt did I feel that for my boys.
Revisiting their work reminds me how much we’ve been encouraged by western society to measure success through productivity, wealth, status and the endless accumulation of more fucking stuff. Happiness is something we can purchase, that our worth is tied to what we produce and that competition is simply human nature. It seems mindblowingly obvious to me that we’ve got it spectacularly wrong!
A good life is one in which we have time to care for and support each other, to feel connected to and care for the places we live, where we have enough rather than endlessly striving for more more more.
The future we ought to be be imagining is one where the wellbeing of people and the planet matters more than the profits of a handful of corporations, surely?
I don’t think it’s that fucking radical to allow ourselves to imagine that (but weirdly it seems to be considered as such?!), especially when we're constantly told that the only way forward is to keep doing more of what got us into this shitty capitalist polycrisis mess in the first place.
We need hope that can withstand reality
Here I am, a cis-het, housed, white woman wanging on about hope. This isn’t coming from a place of toxic positivity, and I don't think hope should become another thing to “do” or a demand placed on people who are already struggling to survive in this world. I am very aware that there are people living through unimaginable suffering who shouldn't have to find a silver lining.
But for the rest of us, we need to be able to look directly at what's happening in the world, to feel angry and to grieve. But not fall into despair. We can’t let that become the only future we can imagine!
As you’re probs well aware, I've spent a fair amount of my life campaigning for things I believe in. I've stood alongside people fighting to protect their local services, marched through streets demanding change, challenged politicians and sat in meetings wondering how on earth we were going to get anyone to listen. And I’ve had more than my fair share of moments when I've felt utterly defeated (13/12/2019 being one of the worst).
And yet, during all these years, I've also seen what happens when people come together!! I've seen people who never thought of themselves as activists discover that they have enormous power when they organise collectively. I've watched communities refuse to accept decisions made without them and demand to be heard. It gives me fucking goosebumps.
Those experiences have shaped the way I think about hope - the act of coming together changes things. People build relationships, learn new skills, discover their own courage and begin to understand that they have more influence than they realised. I believe that's worth something, my friend. I think we sometimes underestimate how much hope can be found in simply being alongside other people who give a shit.
And I know we need to make more space for joy within all of this, too. When we're constantly fighting injustice and worrying about the future, it can be so easy to forget what we're actually trying to fight for, can’t it? Music, laughter, friendship, community, the extraordinary beauty of the natural world…all of that stuff matters.
I want a future where people have the time and freedom to enjoy being alive. Where we're able to experience wonder and delight without feeling guilty that we should be doing something more productive.
So I think we need to spend more time imagining what that kind of future might look like.
The future belongs to all of us
Butler's idea that there are thousands of answers swirls around in my head. The future is being shaped all the time, every single day, every single minute! In our communities, workplaces, relationships and political decisions. Problems won’t be solved by one leader or one dramatic turning point! I believe they’ll be shaped by humans who give a shit!! The ones organising to protect their local hospital or farmland; neighbours growing raspberry bushes in their front garden for everyone to share; workers demanding better conditions and standiing together!
Our future will be shaped by the chats we have about what we want the world to become. I want us to have more of those conversations. I’m already in a few spaces where these kinds of convos happen but I wonder if you are…yet?
I want us to talk about futures in which people have enough, where care is valued, where our relationship with Mother Earth is one of care and responsibility and where we measure success by the wellbeing of our communities rather than our salaries and how much shit we own.
I want us to imagine and take those imaginings seriously!!
The people who benefit from the status quo - the 1% and those in their pockets (looking at you Burnham et al) have a vested interest in convincing us that there’s no other way.
My rallying cry: there are always alternatives. Thousands of them if we listen to Butler.
And that brings me back to my lovely children.
While I can't promise them that everything will be alright or even protect them from everything (try as I might), I can help them understand that they aren't powerless and they have a part to play in what happens next.
I hope that, in my own imperfect way, I'm modelling some of that for them. They've certainly grown up with a mother who gives a shit. They've seen me campaign for things I believe in, challenge people in positions of power, stand up for other people and regularly get very sweary about the state of the world. They've also seen me lose elections, lose friends, get things wrong, feel utterly defeated and wonder whether any of it makes even the slightest bit of fucking difference. There are days when I wonder whether, in trying to raise children who care about injustice, I've sometimes given them too much to worry about?
I can only hope they're also learning that caring is worth it. That solidarity matters. That you don't have to be in an important job to make a difference. I want them to know that even when things feel hopeless, there are people all over the world doing extraordinary things to make life better for others.
More than anything, I want them to have the confidence to imagine a future that excites them, and the tools to help create it. I want them to know how to question the things they're told, to recognise injustice and take a stand. I want them to understand the power of working alongside other people and believe that their actions matter.
Oh god and I so want them to experience joy along the way, too. To fall in love, make brilliant friends, find things they're passionate about and enjoy being alive on this weird and wonderful planet. Because surely that's part of what we're fighting for, too?
So anyway, that's what hope looks like for me right now.
I’m going to keep on imagining a better future and cling to the belief that my children, and all the children growing up in this strange and scary world, deserve more than the future society currently imagines for them. I double dare you to imagine too.
Octavia Butler was right, pals, there are thousands of answers. I just hope I'm raising three of them.