Reflections inspired by visiting a strange and controversial museum...
I want to talk about the idea of walking backwards into the future with our eyes on the past. It’s a piece of wisdom, if you like, that I think occurs in many different cultures.
It certainly appears in the Maori culture as a whakataukī or proverb, checking online, I think it appears also in some form in Tonga and I think in other cultures around the world and it’s been circulating in the West for some time as well.
I’m not going to attempt to explain it to you through the lens of other cultures. There are literally millions of people better qualified than I to do that.
I just wanted to share the sense that I’ve been trying to make out of it for the past few weeks, because I noticed when I thought about it that I found it unexpectedly comforting – even though it runs counter to, the western setting of how I view time: which is the past is behind me in the future is ahead of me and I better keep my eye on what’s coming now.
And none of us want to be accused of living in the past. And yet this proverb, if you like, was comforting to me. And I turned it over a bit. And I thought, well, I suppose the way many of us think of the past is often an edited version of our own lives, edited positively if we’re trying to impress people: we present our career as a series of highly rational choices. Or negatively if we’re feeling depressed, we focus on a few particular events where decisions made by other people have had an adverse effect on us.
But if we really look at the past, it’s actually richer and more complex than that. And I got to thinking that I’m only here and each of us is only here as a result of thousands of interactions by different pairs, if you like, of our ancestors going back over time.
If any of them had met each other at a slightly different time, we wouldn’t any of us actually be here now. So in a sense, it’s taken the universe a lot of work to put me here where I am and you exactly where you are.
When I think about that, I think, oh, I find that a comforting thought. It removes the beguiling simplicity of my life as a series of cause and effects and makes it look like a much richer production.
As I walk down the street, that’s true for every single human being that I’m passing. They are also the product of that incredible rich complexity. I find that strangely comforting.
I was also thinking about the very controversial Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It’s controversial because many of its exhibits were acquired, which is putting it politely, during empire. They were effectively stolen from other cultures and many of them should probably be being returned to them. But the museum’s there, I went to see it.
It is organized in a very interesting way. It’s not organized as most museums are, by time or provenance. It’s organized by function. I remember seeing a small exhibit of snow goggles I can’t remember the detail, but they may, for example, have been a snow goggle from Greenland and snow goggles from Norway and the Alps and the Himalayas from completely different centuries.
I felt quite moved as I realized, oh, across time and cultures, different human beings have been trying to figure out a solution to a practical problem about how to see more clearly in the snow.
It put me in mind of the rich complexity that has put us where we are now. So that way of seeing the past feels quite energizing. And I think in many cultures, they think of the past not as behind us but as enfolded in the present both past and future enfolded in the present.
Some of those ideas feel like they bring a certain life to the past in the present moment, not as a thing that fixes us, but is actually alive in us.
And, maybe in some sense, open to our change, just as my forebears were crafting snow goggles, I can be crafting my future. And then there’s the walking backwards into the future part, why is that comforting?
Surely we need to be looking at the future to take care of what’s happening. I realize that yes, of course there’s a role for that but so many conversations about the future, whether they’re pessimistic or optimistic I start to find unsettling and a bit unmooring because I think they become attempts to attempt to kind of control and make the future certain when it fundamentally isn’t.
I think if we start thinking too far ahead, we easily lose our sense of the fact that the actual future is being created moment by moment, by the decisions each of the billions of us on the planet are making.
That idea of the future as a thing that I am helping to create or if you like, to co-create with others in each moment is increasingly interesting to me.
I know in a lot of my work, I’m absolutely fascinated by how very small shifts in the tone or pace of how we speak have quite a profound impact on the next small step in, for example, a conversation.
All of this reverie feels very connected to my continuing kind of inquiry into what I call unhurried ways of working, where I think that what I’m learning repeatedly from that is all the action is actually in the present moment.
If we can bring more energy and attention to where we are now, the conversation we are in now the people we are with now, there’s a richness in that, that I think is quite powerful and a bit of an antidote to the madness and rush that seems to be the default setting of a technologically driven world.
Photo by Fares Hamouche on Unsplash
