April 12, 2021

Eyes On the Prize

I was scrolling Instagram yesterday when I came across a sponsored post from The Washington Post that was only out to push my buttons, and I hate being manipulated, so I resisted for at least seven seconds, imagining that I wasn’t going to click on this piece: Intelligence forecast sees a post-coronavirus world upended by climate change and splintering societies. But, of course I was going to click, not because I was excited about or interested in the topic, but because such a headline makes me unreasonable anxious, and then I just have to click in order to clarify that it can’t be as bad as all that (which is the whole story of my entire relationship with Twitter, you might recall), and it pretty much was that bad, but of course they’re only forecasts anyway. And I’m distrustful of forecasts. My shameful secret is that I wish fewer people were into tarot, because it’s not sensible, and I’m just really wary of prophecies in general, because they close us off from possibilities, undermining the only thing that’s really clear, which is: nobody knows what’s going to happen next.

“…whoever makes up the story makes up the world.” From Ali Smith’s Autumn, and I think about this all the time. I think it might be the truest thing I know, and certainly it’s been true with the narrative of Covid, as we move from one wave to another with such a sense of inevitability, but it really wasn’t. We’re under strong restrictions here in Ontario right now because of this failure, and I keep thinking about how different things would be if the messaging wasn’t, “Stay home!” but instead, “Get outside!” If people hadn’t been laying bets on a second wave before the first one was over, and instead we’d been shown how to build on our success in bringing down virus levels in the spring, if we’d been empowered to use our behaviour to keep making a difference. If the people who were telling the story (and creating the headlines) had been more cognizant of the weight of their responsibility, the power that they had to shape how the story goes.

I continue to think a lot about this, about my own insistence on there being possibilities in addition to DOOM. I’ve written this before, but there is a correlation between being hopeful and being brave enough to possibly wrong. It takes courage to acknowledge the many different ways the story can go, and insisting on the certainty of worst-case outcomes can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I know the forecasters in the Washington Post article weren’t making their predictions based on tarot cards, and I know that tarot too can be an empowering kind of storytelling at their heart, but regardless, I keep thinking about what we told our kids when they were learning to ride their bikes. Telling them, “Keep looking at where you want to go,” which is a difficult thing to intuit, because you’re thinking about your feet on the pedals, and the wheels, and the path right in front of you, with the whole world whizzing by, but if you aren’t looking out at where you’re going, you’re never going to get there. Keep your eyes on the prize—and even you don’t arrive, you’ll have come to a different, better place than you would have if you’d never bothered to try at all.