FootprintsintheWind.com

It is up to elders to peer into the human essence with sufficient resolution to influence our growth.

:- Doug.

Ultimately we will never get to ultimately. It is a horizon that keeps rolling in front of us because some of our reach exceeds some of our grasp. One leg is always behind the other.

:- Doug.

What would be a good term for a bunch of elders? How about kaleidoscope, like butterflies? A rainbow, swarm, coalition, watch, parliament? Glimmer, radiance, brilliance, panache, scintillation, shimmer, élan, dash, impetus, verve, enthusiasm, aurora, beacon, blaze, luminosity, sparkle, beam, glow, twinkle, scintillation?

:- Doug.

What’s your project?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1895

Once we give sway to algorithms, allow them to make say medical decisions for us we become superfluous. Like the wild animals. Birds. Canada Geese. Monarch butterflies. Bees. Snakes. Frogs. Wheat. Corn. Conversation. Growth.

Algorithms do not need a why. They do not need a meaning. Perhaps our roles then are in Whys and Meanings.

So then the work of the elders will perhaps be to help us find what our roles should be, to find our Whys, Meanings, and Stories.

This is a bigger role than I thought. It is not merely making humanity better. It is choosing a role once our old story no longer fits.

We had thought we were the smartest. We had thought we were those who collaborated the best. Yet algorithms can connect and communicate and thereby collaborate. They can connect to us and read us and our very thoughts. Because we let them. So now we reach a species-level identity crisis.

The very point is that I do not know the answer. I do not even want one answer. We need to work together beyond working together. We need to think together. We need to create. We need to dig deeply to figure out who we are. Together. We need to converse.

What do we want to have happen? Where?

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

If science—and probably the human world—progresses one funeral at a time, what happens when funerals become rarer, further apart? Will we stay daring longer? Ought we? Will we be householders longer, overpopulate? Will we think longer-term? Even be more spiritual?

:- Doug.

Pray for the 300-year grandchild elders, and for those generations between now and then. For what will you dare pray for them?

:- Doug.

What will limit this possible future?

:- Doug.

All through we will tell one another stories, starting with our own, eventually telling how the 300-year grandchild elders will live and heed. Each week is practice writing and telling stories, and all learning is in the form of story.

:- Doug.

How to tell a story so the generations will hear—and heed?

:- Doug.

A story can begin well with “Imagine…” or “What if…?”

:- Doug.

Why do we think our stories are fantastical? And why ever would the 300-year grandchild elders think so?

:- Doug.

Let us tell one another stories of futures possible, and improbable: to see.

:- Doug.

In futures for our species, what can be avoided? What cannot?

:- Doug.

We will exert ourselves to the extreme and we may only bend the arc of the species an infinitesimal degree. Indeed we may move it to its detriment. We have such weak tools, imagination and story—what are those?

:- Doug.

In smaller scales, details are complex, nonlinear, even random. In larger scale, sense, meaning, and even surprise may be seen. Consider the bee, the ant, the human in their colonies. Emergence might be either direction. Be alert.

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1894

This is not the way it must be.

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

I see a book title. I may have read it before. It is easier to download or find it again than to search my library. How do we know what we write will last long enough to be found? Maybe we are not providing stories to be found but to affect a trajectory? Where do trajectories live?

:- Doug.

Just got reminded of the Hemingway story, “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” As Aristotle says, it tells a beginning, a middle, and an end, with fear or pity in between. An effective outline for a story.

:- Doug.

In our society we consider elderly to mean diminished. We could mean developed, expanded, enlarged, grown, extended, amplified.

:- Doug.

Is all possible good reducible to Dollars? Is money just a method of score keeping, or is it a way to avoid thinking about what harm or good we might be doing?

:- Doug.

Our leaders are incapable of this* so we must. *Dealing with climate change, election attacks, violence….

:- Doug.

Is a human a brain? Is a brain limited to a skull? Is a mind limited to a brain? What do you think? And why? And how? What do you choose to think and why? What do your friends choose to think and why? The people around? Yet all of this thinking and choosing and why and how may become known. And used. More, we’re not just choosing yes and no, but also pathways. Responsibility? To call a halt to what is bad, to prod in directions wise and benign?

:- Doug.