March 2001
Bert Speelpenning
As a kid, I went everywhere on my bike. Back from visiting a friend, I once complained at the dinner table about a particular long stretch of road being boring. Why, asked my Dad jokingly, didn't I just skip that stretch?
The question intrigued me then and intrigues me still. It allows me to see how much I take for granted that I know how the world works. Much of how I relate to the world comes from a model built when I was crawling around and learning to walk, and watching bigger folks do things I couldn't do. Surely, when I get bigger, I will be able to reach that doorknob, that cookie jar. A fundamental relationship to the world is established early: I reach for what is out of reach.
As a grown-up, I dwell in grown-up language, riddled with abstract terms yet dense in metaphors based in bodies moving about. Yet even abstract stuff I relate to in bodily terms: I equate power with reach, freedom with room, love with sticking in mouth, and future with what's around the next corner. Goodness is within grasp, Once I Get Bigger. The real joke is that I think of myself as a thinker, or that I ever got a PhD. I'm still on tippy-toes reaching for the doorknob!
I am seeing how my sense of future is skewed by my early body experiences, and I think our whole civilization shares this bias. Look at our language. The future is near or distant, it beckons or looms. Our goals for the future must be reachable, though we may have to stretch, we have to have clear milestones along the way, and of course there has to be a way to get there from here. We work shoulder to shoulder to reach the goal, we stay on target, we take the next step. We relate to future as destination.
There are different directions we can take, once we are willing to drop future as destination. My aim right now is to come to grips with how small I've made the future out to be and confront how much I've been waiting Till I Get Bigger before aligning on something huge. What if the future is something to be welcomed into our home, to be ushered in rather than walked towards? I'm ready, now, to usher in a civilization based in peace, integrity and play. And I'm ready to give up all the reasons I had for waiting. I raise a toast, to a new future!