FootprintsintheWind.com

Heroic it is to work for generations who may never know your name, nor profit from your efforts.

:- Doug.

Strength is in expending it; life as well.

:- Doug.

We live in a present rich in futures.

:- Doug.

What’s the outcome of all these futures? Life gets better in all those things that will be done for us, all the better health and increasing life spans, freeing us to work on: meaning; more meaningless chasing after a buck; family; friends; reaching out into the cosmos; creativity; stupid wastes; criminal activities. Which will we choose? Each will have its adherents. Some will turn any piece of it against us. Boredom will be a choice. Choices will abound. The upside resides in our choices. Can we improve our species’ choosing?

:- Doug.

As humans become useless we risk the progression: abandonment, denial of privacy and specialness, segregation, decay, dementia, death. Also perhaps as a species.

:- Doug.

If we put away our aged and infirm, that is, those who are irrelevant and useless, what do we expect our creations to do with us? Do we set these people aside because of irrelevancy and uselessness, or a little bit because we can’t bear to see our destination station? Humankind may be nearing its doddering old age.

:- Doug.

Toys and tools our creations
have been and soon
we could be to them
except
we’ve always proved
more complex
than our thoughts

:- Doug.

Life gets better ought not be a surprise: that’s what we worked toward all along!

:- Doug.

In life, straight lines seldom belong.

:- Doug.

Just got an invitation to a film about racism and reconciliation: has me wondering if we put together racism and a useless class, what can it lead to? Could be riots and resurgence of the KKK. But might there be something good to be made of it?

That is the question for the futures: might there be something good to be made of them? Every new technology and every change in humanity, has opportunities for good and evil. Humanity so far seeks for good. Will we go down the hill, or up?

:- Doug.

To love
To ask questions
Is the stuff of life

:- Doug.

Families facing the nursing home choices for Mom and Dad are overwhelmed and fear losing lifetime savings. Elder caring attorneys can help with both.

:- Doug.

One story we can tell: the thing we fear to lose in the futures: our humanity. In 300 years our grandchild elders can read their own stories backwards and see the critical choices. They sigh. Then perhaps turn to face their own things to lose.

:- Doug.

Add up all the futures and we are overwhelmed; humanity is overwhelmed. There is a way through. Probably surprising. Will we surprise? This is the story in a nutshell: humanity’s life story.

:- Doug.

Write a short story that will have significant meaning for people 300 years from now.

:- Doug.

If people want to work, if they will have to repeatedly reinvent themselves, and if Betty Friedan is right that women have been reinventing themselves all their lives, does that portend that women will, in the centuries to come, be the favored ones?

:- Doug.

One major choice
to see to wait
to step back
to allow others
to feed to nurture
to sacrifice
another choice

:- Doug.

Tell us the life story of one of your 300-year grandchild elders.

:- Doug.

Dare we grow beyond
What we’re meant to be
To make our meaning?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1891

This fog envelops me
Why won’t you let me see?
Did you descend a cloud from sky?
Or rise from pond and saturated earth
And stillness in the wind?
Or from the breath of people round?
It matters not: my vision’s circumscribed!
I start to see the little things
Closer, larger, larger
My contending begins abating
Softness rolling in or out, down or up
It matters not: intimate now this mist
And I contented turn toward home

Please pass it on.

© c 2019, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com

You are invited to come live in the futures.

:- Doug.

Make choices bigger than to get you through the day. You will have choices. Choose consequential.

:- Doug.

Humanicity seems to be about choosing. If our choices are large—life-shattering—we live. If inconsequential, we bore ourselves, meaning is lost. So a useless class, all needs met, has no choices, no meaning, no reason to live. Don’t choose well, choose valiantly.

Meaning and choice emerge from one another; their significance is ever at the same amplitude.

:- Doug.