Carl Sagan was a human treasure, and I keep a good many of his words and ideas close. They are like salves for a wounded heart, and inspiration for another day of trying, doing, supporting, and making. For the world will wound you, it will make you cry, but so too can laughter and a smile always be found. ‘The sun is always rising on some lonely land’, my latest song goes, ‘and the day will be much brighter for you’. I wrote it for my 1-year-old, Hugo, on his birthday last Sunday.
The wisdom of people like Sagan, and the others I’ve written about here and elsewhere, have shaped me. They are like my many sculptures working alongside my physical and mental exertions to be just a little bit better, a little bit wiser, a touch happier, and a whole lot of resilient.
Lately, one of Sagan’s quotes in particular keeps cropping into my mind and it is the subject of this post:
“The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are.”
Our children will inherit the earth, they will also inherit our vision of and about it, their place in it, the importance of things, hierarchies of compassion and ambition alike, and so much more. Sagan is saying, accurately, that the beliefs, stories, aspiration, and more we instill in our children will have a meaningful impact on the world they will build. And what a world it could be. Or not.
Oh, the places you’ll go. Maybe it’s because I am raising two young children that this quote is resonating so much, or maybe it’s the dire state of our environmental trajectory. Maybe it’s the collapse of political order in so many ways. The point is, there’s a lot to choose from if we want to paint a troublesome vision for our kids. But there is so much to be hopeful for, and equally more worth fighting for.
The kids are watching.
This brings me to role models. Who society elevates sends a clear message to our children on appropriate behavior, on worthy aspiration, on how we treat one another. Partly enabled by our semi-anonymous digital avatars, and partly enabled by design and choice, we are in many ways painting a bleak and weak prototype of human potential and success. But as I say to my children, those prototypes are like ghosts, they ring hollow, and they deliver nothing in terms of peace or spiritual salvation. They must be constantly reinforced and repeated else they fade like the apparitions that they are. And though this may seem a dour state, ever worsening, there is always a counterpoint. For as much lying and fighting and bickering as we see, the opposite is available to us as well. Compromise, acceptance, recognition of our connection to one another and the planet. The things that work for our bodies and minds, our communities, our relationships to our loved ones, and our faith. These things rarely change and young people and old alike are finding them and rediscovering them by the millions. As Ziggy Marley sings in his song ‘True to Myself’: “Day in day out, I’ve asked many questions. Only to find the truth never changes.”
The positive vision is out there, and it is gathering steam. To use just one example, young people are reading more physical books again as a testament to the gift we give ourselves by reading. These gifts include gaining understanding, knowledge, and being more accepting of others. Reading offers us peace and resilience, a way to reduce stress, increase vocabulary, and stimulate your brain to dream a better world.
Dreams are maps, Sagan continued, and I’ve tried to take this to heart recently when going to bed. Rather than worrying about something or being angry about the oppression and suffering in todays’ world, I think about how beautiful my two young boys are. I think about them smiling, laughing, running, and sleeping too. I think about my other loved ones, my wife, my mother, and sometimes I just think about pickleball (hey, you do you ;). Whatever it is, these good thoughts have been beyond helpful for sleeping. They have leant an assist to the productivity of the next day. And this practice is echoed by other great thinkers, like Sadhguru, who speaks of the influence and importance of last thoughts on both sleep and on the ‘nature of your wakefulness the next morning.’ Simply, alongside daily practices like movement and mindfulness, this dream strategy is a way to rewire your brain towards positive thinking. As F1’s Lewis Hamilton is quoted, “A negative mindset never leads to a positive life.”
If our nightly dreams are a map for the soul to navigate the next day, then our big dreams can chart the constellations of human connection and potential. We can see the world becoming bright, verdant, compassionate, and peaceful. We can hear the music that vibrates from one life to the next and cherish the continuum of life, death, and interconnected re-birth. We can paint, draw, play, and act these visions of the future for our children, and we can be these visions. And as we carry these children, and then they walk beside us and we tell them that they one day will carry us, we can rest easy each night with this thought in our hearts. We did our best.
Be Good to Yourself (and them, be good to them especially)
Ken
The Cultural Easton 