An Uncommon, But Important, Timeline
“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come .”
- Terry Tempest Williams
Most of us (for reasons we will go into later) are focused on issues impacting the next few hours or days or months. What’s for dinner? What should we watch on Netflix? What sort of policies should we enact? Who is going to be President, or Senator? What should we do about our city’s school board? What will the stock market do? Who will be nominated for the Supreme Court? What will tuition cost when my daughter starts college, etc.? Our present situation has been brought about by billions of similar human decisions mostly focused on the very near term 3 . However, we now live at a time of astonishing complexity and interconnectivity – more so than at any other time on this planet. Focusing on the present, while hoping that the future will somehow turn out wonderfully well, is both naïve and dangerous.
Very few people have a 10- or 30-year view of how systems connect, and
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