If the stories we tell are so central to how things turn out, where do we look for stories to encourage us, stories to provide the energy for a future of promise?
Here's one way of thinking about this question. Imagine looking through a camera, with the lens tightly focused on one spot in the foreground. Everything else is fuzzy and indistinct. You then refocus the lens to a place in the background, and bring that into focus. And what was clear before is now hazy.
Stories of needs or images of problems may be in the foreground, but we can willfully shift our attention to something that is useful and encouraging in the background. When we draw it forward, its arrival crowds out whatever had been the focus of our attention, and pushes it into the diffuse background.
If one part of life offers little to sustain us, we might shift our gaze to another aspect: to an individual, our neighborhood, nature, God's love, faith in humanity, the causes in which we believe, the miracle of the universe, the marvel of discoveries past and future. There is always a level of system, whether tinier or greater, that can inspire us.
The place we choose to stand, the stories we choose to tell, and the power we choose to claim have a heart so simple, so obvious that it's apt to elude us.
Can you see a glimpse of the world you want?
Barely a week after 9/11, a group came together for a workshop at the University of British Columbia. After we'd puzzled over some of the unconventional ideas and improbable questions you've read about in this book, I asked them: So what is it that we're working toward? After all is said and done, what kind of a world is it that we want? What kind of world do you want? Can you express it in a single word, or maybe two?
I'd asked these questions of groups many times before. That afternoon it was different. I spoke with a lump in my throat. The words came out softly, in my deepest voice.
The first person to answer said she wanted a "safe" world. Heads nodded. We could all relate to that wish. In fact, I have a hunch that on that particular day, most would have called safety an urgent "need."
I wrote "safe" at the very top of the large sheet of paper on the wall.
Only seconds passed before Virginia Henderson offered another view. "I think it's a different world than safe," she said. "I think that's past. It's a confident world I want."
In that moment, Virginia shifted our attention. Before she spoke, we had become focused on our despair, our fear, our hunger for security, and the apparently insoluble problem of terrorism. Under the circumstances, it seemed unthinkable to speak of anything else. Virginia's words brought our inner resources into view, and opened the possibility that we might face the future with courage and strength.
I wrote "confident" next to "safe." We worked with other responses for a few minutes more. Then, as we looked at all of the assets we had written on that same long sheet of paper, at the workshop's outset a few days before, I posed another question that I always ask: Look to the words at the top of the sheet, those to which we aspire. Can we see here and now any evidence of the kind of world we want--any sign that at least some of what we want is already here?
The group had gravitated toward the notion of a "confident" world, so I picked up on that and added, "any evidence that you can see of a confident world?"
Silence. All of us, eyes moist, turned to look at Virginia, who had flown half-way around the world from Australia.