A few thoughts on the emerging future that is already here, even as more folks, closer to the center of the current dominant system, begin to deepen in alarm. As the end of this road becomes ever more looming.

The leaders we need are already leading. They are weaving, connecting, designing, prototyping, proof of concepting, sheltering, nurturing, feeding, peace building, land caring, library protecting, public art-making.

They just don’t look like what the teaching at the heart of empire told you a leader looked like.

The infrastructure we need is already being assembled. It lives in conversations, in journals, in prototypes, in pilots, in pop-ups, in retrofits, in necessity, in stubborn commitment, in wacky ideas, in people with shovels, in sea grass beds, in threads from the past.

It just doesn’t look like the infrastructure of empire. It is green. It is living. It is soft. I may be ephemeral. It may be humble. It will surely be experimental. But it still, like water over rock, is laying new paths.

Don’t look at who is making no mistakes; look at who is trying many things and embracing error as a teacher.

So, if the heat, the floods, the endless wars, the precarity is awakening something that might feel like panic; the action is less to invent a new solution than it is to soften your gaze, or lengthen it. Shift your image of solution into a way, not a what. Find your way to the way.

And for that matter, consider: change also may not look like what the dominant empire taught you it looks like. Learn to see change that is meandering. With a multiplicity of causes and no one “actor”. Change that is branching. That loops.

That is quiet for longer than you think you can bear, until on a day yet to come, the world is more mended, more alive, opening into the future, just when it felt the future was closing.

A dead-end system is not going to teach you how to spot its successor.