possibility studies

By foregrounding hope, imagination, agency and creativity, we can get to fully appreciate what it means to be human in a world that oftentimes resists our needs, expectations, and aspirations.

The overwhelming threat of climate change has amplified the sense that global capitalism is out of control or that the best we can hope for is to avert catastrophe.

Consequently, when we think about possibilities it’s not as much about what we do in the present that shapes the future, but more about how we use the future to shape the present (Damhof, 2022).

I’ve found a strikingly similar pattern among political leaders, academics, NGO workers, businesspeople and young high-fliers, and not just in Europe and North America. Young people that I met in Africa were generally quite optimistic, but here too, despite burgeoning science-fiction scenes, dynamic hubs of digital innovation and lively political

It is not accidental, in this context, that the inability to reimagine one’s life is a primary indicator of traumatic experiences, and its reversal represents a key sign of recovering and, in some cases, of entering a new phase of post-traumatic growth.

Possibility is nourishing nectar. Every drop is needed to meet the multisystemic stuckness. Yet that possibility is caged in plans. Paying attention in this era requires a loosening.

Nora Bateson, Combining

Although imagination is messy and fragmentary, I’ve found many patterns that we can make use of. I highlight that all novel inventions extend, invert or combine existing ideas; imagination is never a tabula rasa. Instead, our minds play with what’s around us, building on already familiar concepts, and we can choose to do this more systematically.

Even when possibilities are imagined by single individuals, awareness of what is possible and its enactment take place within the evolving interdependence between person and context.