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Making it (inter)personal

Exploring the Future can seem like an abstract, daunting, monumental or even occult task, and many people tend to be overwhelmed when faced with an infinite, monolithic Future, the one with the capital “F”. To engage with people who may benefit from exploring futures, it often helps to find relevant connections with their personal lives. This section describes several techniques that can bridge the ravine between the Big Future and familiar, everyday life.

On a human scale, time flows from the past towards the future, from birth to death, entangled in the cyclical diurnal and seasonal rhythms of nature. No matter how big or distant the future might appear, it has its roots in the past and the present. If we believe that the universe evolves through dynamic interactions of elements in an ever-changing dance between order and chaos, then each of our individual and collective thoughts, words and actions influence the unfolding of the future. Who we are and what we do today is the source of all our tomorrows, both big and small. So, before expanding into the sometimes unwieldy territories of foresight, we find it useful to reconnect with our personal sources of particular futures, which begin and end in embodied experience. In this section we describe a few techniques that can bring out the knowledge gained through experiential learning – something that is too often ignored or taken for granted. These techniques are meant to complement cerebral analysis with somatic, situated, social and interpersonal understanding.

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  • Last modified: 2015-05-18 13:20
  • by maja