Anyone who enjoys the Back to the Future trilogy knows a flux capacitor is the crucial element to the de Lorean time travel vehicle.

When it comes to our futures, a “flux capacitor” is what ŵe create to make it possible to journey to our possible futures, and back to begin to live our preferred future in the present.

Yesterday, I found myself pondering presence, the infinite game, and capacity as important components of flux.

Presence, or being fully present now increases as we develop character and talent, the infinite game is about how we get to play out these dimensions, and capacity is what we produce – the ability to time travel.

‘Time is eternity living dangerously.’*

I connect forgiveness here because it’s a kind of flux capacitor.  Forgiveness makes it possible for deep relationships to be formed, including the friendships we’ll need for our time travel adventures – at the heart of which we find integrity, wholeness, and perseverance.

Whereas Back to the Future’s flux capacitor is fiction (though you can buy one), the other kind is readily available.

‘Friendship is the sweet grace which liberates us to approach, recognise and inhabit the adventure.’*.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)

Three thoughts I found myself pondering at the beginning of today.

The first was about PRESENCE – how becoming Human is about becoming more present to you, to one another, to our world, and to ourselves.

The second was about the INFINITE GAME and how I long for more people  to discover their talents and develop these with passion and imagination.

The third thought was concerning CAPACITY, which involves at least three developing dimensions: character, talents, and at least one other, (perhaps futures thinking, playing reali games, developing story).

Flux is “the action or process of flowing or flowing out” – the experience of life we all get to explore.

I’ve just listed my ten most influential reads – one of the ideas in Claudia Altucher’s Become An Idea Machine.

Looking over them I realise they’re about becoming – we are Human Becomings – and how it’s a journey.

Which pretty much sums it up.

Enjoy life.

If you were to take out a piece of paper and listed ten things you thought would make your life better, would they be things which made life easier, or ask you to put in more effort?

Just before you make your list, if I add, there’s a load of unique curiosities, and amazing skills and abilities in you waiting to get out, how would this shape your list?

Or, what did we miss?

Edgar Schein writes  about how: ‘we take in a great deal of data but our tendency to leap to judgement prevents us from reflecting on most of it’.*  Schein’s immediate reflection is on a terrible evening when his granddaughter cut her forehead and had to be taken to hospital a long way away, altogether taking up six hours.  When he was asked this question afterwards he realised he’d missed six hours of brightness and chattiness from his grandchild.

We know it, don’t we?  We miss so much of what is happening in and around us.

”It is strange to be here.  The mystery never leaves you alone.  Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.  A world lives within you.’**

A world?  Really?

I believe it.  When people begin to notice what lies within them, it is, nothing less then a whole, wonderful world.

The person who listens makes it possible for these new worlds to come to birth, and, when joined with others, create new solar systems.  They are an infinite gamester:

‘They did not expect an infinite listener who joyously took their unlikeness on himself, giving them their own voice through the silence of wonder, a healing and holy metaphor that leaves everything still to be said.^

(*From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)
(^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

Lament and reality and despair and mourning.

Not our favourite words but necessary when it comes to opening the future.

‘There is mourning to be done for those who do not know he deathliness of their situation.  There is mourning to be done with those who know pain and suffering and lack the power or freedom to bring it to speech.’*

We possibly struggle to take hold of a new future because we’re unable to let go of the past.  The future can be too alive for us to handle.  What we are able to do, how we might relate, the art we are capable of bringing is to hot to deal with.

Unless we let the past die, we’ll re-establish what we have sought to escape and the new future quickly looks like the deathly past.

I’ve recently been exploring the idea of the new prophet,** the one who articulates an alternative reality for those who struggle but are not heard.

The prophet tells me:
Life is hard: a lament;
I am not as special as I think and my life is not about me: reality;
I am not in control: despair; 
I am going to die: mourning.  

Strangely, I find myself on the threshold of new possibilities;
Life is hard, yet, somehow, it’s here we find beauty;
We’re not special or the focus, but in serving each other we’re served and feel alive;
We are not in control but we are free;
We are going to die, but first we are going to be fully alive.

(*From Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.)
(**The new prophet is not abrasive, rather what she sees is expressed in humility, gratitude, and faithfulness, towards a flowering of integrity, wholeness, and perseverance, resulting in courage, generosity, and wisdom.)

I believe in new futures: futures different to the ones likely to happen if we continue along the path we’ve been on for so long.

Most of all, I believe in futures for those who think that only other people have new futures.

I can’t create a new future for anyone.  Only they can do this.  And they can because they’re more amazing than they think.

But what I can do is be there with people as their future emerges.

There’s a shortage of people who’ll stand in this place and say to someone: go!

It may be that you’re the person who needs a new future, or maybe your the person who can say go!

You’re probably both, because what you’ve experienced you want to pass on to others.

You know it’s important for people to see more, but also that when someone sees a new future, there’s often an unnoticed emotional response to this, which can lead them to say no.  You then help them to see this so they’re able to go!

The new future is not an idea, it’s simply how life is.

‘It is the repeated parallel that brings us to see that the society that creates natural waste creates human waste.’*

Waste is what we give to losers, nonpersons,^ those who inhabit non-history – but this will change.

Our world is looking for ‘those who look everywhere for difference, who see the earth as source, who celebrate the genius in others, who are not prepared against but for surprise’.**

Those who welcome and accept this invitation will move towards the centre of history, be creators of a new world.

George Friedman suggests by 2030 western nations will be competing for immigrant workers.^  As the populations of these countries age, they’ll struggle to find the workers they need to maintain growth.  There will be an altering of border policies in many countries.

Whilst this will see an increase in tensions felt at the moment, behind it there can be a very positive story, as Humans take another step forward in their development, becoming more open to and creators of a new age in which there is no waste.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**Nonpersons is a term coined by Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination.)
(^From George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years.  This date will possibly have been pushed by the global recession, but powerful forces are observable right now.)

We have more ways of being able to see and hear than ever before, but it’s possible many of us hear and see less than our foremothers and fathers did.

Wanting to arrive quickly, our seeing and hearing fall in line, but:

‘Genuine travel has no destination.  Travellers do not go somewhere. but constantly discover they are somewhere else.’*

We are travellers more than arrivers: through time, space, relationships, work, hope, love – every day.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

How curious can we be?

It seems, when we let go of our desires and needs to control, we’re able to explore with deeper curiosity – taking us beyond the average, allowing us to be surprised by the unpredictable.

When we let go of our desire to be above or beyond something, and to enter into it,  our curiosity and our Humanity is set free.